Principles of Growth
by Trinitas
Summary: House knew Chase was some kind of heretic, but what he learns about his protégé after getting on the wrong side of the Consistorial Court is beyond anything he'd ever guessed. House/His Dark Materials crossover, AU, Chase-centric, House/Wilson established, House/Chase father/son, supernatural elements.


**Principles of Growth**

**Preface:**

This is a very, _very_ alternate version of my already-alternate dæmonverse. Don't ask where it came from; this was a story that decided to tell itself and pulled me along for the ride.

I suppose that it isn't so much an AU (or even an AAU) as a fusion, placing House characters and their dæmons (i.e. their souls, which in this world are externalized and take animal forms representative of the given character's personality) in the societal context of Pullman's His Dark Materials.

This world incorporates modern technology in place of the steampunk conventions Pullman employed, but retains the ideology represented in his texts. This is an aggressively patriarchal world run by the Magisterium, a theocratic institution based on overzealous Catholicism (i.e., to the extent that there is no separation between church and state); the terms 'Magisterium' and 'Church' are used interchangeably.

As the jobs available to women are severely restricted, this version of the hospital is run by Foreman, with Cuddy as, essentially, a glorified secretary. Cameron is a nurse in pediatrics. Chase is House's sole fellow, as Foreman doesn't have any interest in combating House's misanthopy and feels that the expense of one fellow is enough (especially considering it's difficult to find people who can tolerate House for long stretches). Both House and Wilson retain their canonical positions, with Wilson occasionally joining Chase in Diagnostics during a DDX when House requires an extra contributor/sounding-board.

This story began in the center of something larger, so bear with me as I take you through a few necessary background details: House had previously been noticed by the authorities for his unorthodox medical practice; when a deeper investigation was made, he made a few blasphemous, heretical and seditious remarks to the members of the clergy in charge.

Shortly thereafter, he was called before the Consistorial Court of Discipline and cut away from his dæmon, a measure viewed as spiritually corrective (as an elementary particle referred to as "Dust" in the series, which is taken by the Church as physical evidence of original sin, is able to settle only on adults connected to their dæmons) but in practice about as damaging as a full frontal lobotomy. In this world, however, there fortunately exists a little magic; toss in the Law of the Conservation of Energy and it's plausible enough to bend Pullman's canon just a few degrees and put House back together—mostly. That sort of thing leaves one wide open to PTSD.

Of course, the witches responsible for the mending would have gone to ground in such a society, so a mechanism was necessary to get House into contact with them—and the mechanism had its own story.

Read on…

**Prologue: Judgment Day**

"And on the charge of heresy, you are found guilty and sentenced to intercision."

That word rings like a gunshot.

He wishes it had been: a bullet would have been merciful.

He clutches Minerva1 hard against his heart. She's clutching him, too, hand-like paws clinging to the fabric of his shirt, and he can feel her nails pricking his skin. He knows it's over; knows they're going to be dragged off and turned into the worst kind of vegetable. Knows that there's nothing he can do, no way he can fight. They took his cane, and he's flanked by a burly guard and German shepherd dæmon on each side.

He remembers Eunomia2, identical to them, and struggling against his father's restraining arms; remembers the pain of heavy paws pinning Minerva down, crushing her.

_And right now _you're _crushing me,_ she says, squirming a little in his arms. _Would you mind loosening up a tad so we can breathe?_

Ah. So the constriction in his chest isn't the stress of impending doom, after all. He loosens his hold slightly and draws a deep breath, absently noting that whoever said that was calming was lying through his goddamned teeth.

"The condemned will be escorted to—"

"'The condemned' happens to have a _name_!" he snarls.

Maybe it's just that they're so assured of their power, so unused to being challenged, but they're not rushing to silence him. He has a minute or two before the shock of interruption wears off, and if he's going down, at least he'll go having had the last word.

_That's the spirit, _Minerva says dryly as he sets her down on the table, stroking gray-brown fur once before he lets her go. _Granted, our big mouth also got us into this, but I'm all for dying as we've lived. Hit it. _

"You're not actually winning anything here," he says, raising his voice to carry. There're good acoustics in this room, a nice dramatic resonance: all that's missing is defiant background music. "Destroying my soul isn't going to make me believe in your _logical fallacy_ of a holy book."

The guards glare at him, but he's gotten better dirty looks than theirs and disapproval isn't going to shut him up. The next thing they'll do is drag him away, but for the moment, they don't have the orders to do that. And domestic dog people do nothing without orders from a higher-up.

"The condemned will be _silent_," the judge says pointedly, "or he will be held in contempt of—"

He barks a laugh. "You hand down capital punishment and expect me to give a crap about contempt of court? Either you've been overindulging in the blood of Christ, or you're even more of a moron than I thought!"

Minerva takes over before anyone can recover from that, and he relishes the affront that registers on every face when she addresses the room at large: he can't see, but he knows jet-dark eyes are gleaming with the same satisfaction. "Moving right along—please let us know if the big words go over your heads, since your god seems to prefer his earthly representatives stupid—we repent nothing, we recant nothing and we regret _nothing_!"

"Except," House adds, "that we won't get to appreciate the day society finally pulls its head out of its collective ass and figures out that Holy Mother Church is full of lying hypocrites—"

"And you can all go to hell and fuck yourselves on arrival!" Minerva finishes for them.

It's a shame there aren't more church officials here: it would have made the blasphemy that much sweeter.

There is a long silence. Then: "Bailiff!"

Two crisp, military-precision syllables and he's being dragged out of the room, escorted by the guards alongside. The pace is too fast (on purpose, no doubt) and his leg is protesting heartily, sharp shocks of pain with every step, but he doesn't care because the anticipation of the pain ahead is worse.

But apparently they're not going to be severed yet: the journey stops in front of a holding cell. He's shoved in, overbalances and falls, his bad leg crumpling beneath him. He grunts; Minerva hisses.

The door clangs shut. He looks up, and his stomach lurches when he sees that the bitch dæmons have kept Minerva on the other side; watches as they herd her into what's presumably the cell adjacent.

The design of the cellblock means that she's a few paces past comfortable distance. Not enough to cause the wrenching pain of heart drawn between ribs, but there's still a dull, persistent ache he can't do anything to ease.

He shifts his weight to his left side, gets up and over to the bed and lies down. There's no pillow, so he presses his hands to his chest where Minerva should be.

It doesn't help.

_They_ would _have to sink to psychological torture,_ she says. But she sounds shaky, because separate rooms are a horrible, horrible arrangement. He can't see her and they can't touch, and that's the worst of it because he wants to hold her even more than he wants Vicodin to muffle his screaming leg.

She croons softly into their mind, little should-be-comforting sounds to soothe them, but it's no good. His leg hurts and his heart hurts and his arms are sickeningly empty.

_This is what we get for insisting on the last word,_ he says.

_But it was_ worth it_._ She infuses her tone with all the conviction they can muster. _ The looks on their faces…_

He smiles a little, grimly, because although they're being punished for what they said, it had to _be_ said. Silence would have implied consent, acceptance, and the last thing he wants is for the bastards to have the satisfaction of breaking them a second before they're actually dead.

Well. As good as.

_What'll they do with us after, do you think? _Minerva asks.

_Probably let us go, since we'll be all spiritually corrected and cleansed of our nasty heretical atheism. Keeping us locked up forever would mean they'd have to pay for our upkeep, and they won't want to do that._

_So Wilson will end up taking care of us, _she surmises, _since I seriously doubt we'll be able to do it ourself._

He's not sure what level he'll be capable of functioning on like that, but the idea of Wilson reduced from partner to nursemaid is repugnant. Maybe someone will convince him to put them in some nursing home with the senile and demented: they should be damaged enough to fit right in.

But he knows Wilson won't. It would go against everything in his illogically devoted nature, and that's why he'll end up dutifully caring for—for the two of them.

_There's a small mortality rate, _Minerva says. _ Maybe we'll get lucky._

_Less than five percent, _he replies. _No way is our luck _that _good._

_Would you mind?_ she huffs. _I'm trying to lift our mood here, and you're not helping by thinking about the odds!_

_What am I supposed to think about?_ he demands. _ In case you didn't notice, imminent doom is _slightly _difficult to ignore, and it's not like they left us distractions!_

_Yeah, I know. Don't bitch at me; we're miserable enough._

Miserable. Right.

Miserable is a word for cold, wet days when he gets barometric pain along with the neuropathic and Foreman makes him do clinic duty. It doesn't even begin to contain what he feels about being physically alone during the long wait for the guillotine.

He presses his hands harder to his heart and tries to appreciate the pain, because as long as he can feel it, they're still a complete person; she's still _there_.

_I should have kept my mouth shut,_ he says. _I feel like some overdone textbook example of hubris._

_Wilson's going to hate being right about our ego getting us killed, _Minerva says.

He closes his eyes on the drab walls of the cell and thinks of Wilson; of the warm, safe feeling of Rona curled around Minerva, wolf and raccoon dozing together. Of banter that's playful and arguments that aren't; of maple sugar-sweet pancakes and sex on weekend mornings; of the contented haze of afterglow and idly caressing hands.

If he were given to self-delusion, he'd try to convince himself this is a nightmare.

It's two hours before the guards return and open the doors, and he wants to pick Minerva up and hold her against him, but without the cane, he needs his arms free for balance—

They grab his arms roughly and cuff his hands behind his back.

_So much for balance,_ he thinks bitterly, gritting his teeth against the leg pain as they pull him along. But Minerva's following at his heels, and the pain of too much distance has stopped.

Soon they're out of the building and in the back of a locked car, glass and wire mesh separating them from the driver. Minerva climbs onto his lap and nuzzles against his torso, and although the restraints keep him from stroking her the way they'd like, her weight and warmth is comforting.

He tries to focus on that. Tries not to think of where they're going and what's going to happen there.

Doesn't tell himself they're not terrified, because the lie wouldn't help.

It feels like a small eternity before the car lurches to a stop and the engine falls silent, but it's still far, far too soon. Another car, this one containing the guards, parks a few spaces down.

If there were a god, the guards and the driver and anyone else involved in the intercision process would be struck by lightning and drop dead right about now.

Several seconds pass.

_There is no god, _Minerva says flatly.

_Forget divine intervention; I'd take Dad's help if it'd get us out of this. _ Hell, if Church authorities were to swoop in and give him the chance to recant everything and go free, he would: no principle is worth living intercised.

One of the guards opens the passenger door, then leans in and _grabs_ Minerva from him, hands where no hands but Wilson's are allowed; and he knows pain intimately but this is beyond pain, beyond—beyond _anything_.

He can hear Minerva squalling but can't comprehend anything but the dizzy-nauseous-_wrong_ feeling of hands groping inside him.

Some tiny, detached part of their mind produces the word 'rape,' but it's gone as fast as it forms, dissipating like smoke.

Movement.

Pain.

Bile rising in his throat.

Trying to breathe.

"That shut them up."

"Definitely an improvement."

Movement. Doors. Corridors.

"Have to say, though, mouthing off to the court like that took guts."

"Nah. He was just desperate. Nothing left to lose."

Movement. White walls. The hiss of hydraulic locks engaging. Voices.

The guards let them go, Minerva landing heavily at his feet. He feels the shock of the impact, half-sinks and half-falls to his knees. She drags herself onto his lap and he breathes again, bends until his chest brushes her back because it's not much protection but he has to put _something_ between her and those violating hands.

_They—they— _ She can't even find words; their mind is still stuttering. _Greg—_

_Don't. _He draws a deep breath. _We are _not _giving the bastards the satisfaction._

_They're already satisfied—I swear if I could still change I would_ kill _them—_

"Up. On your feet."

He lifts his head. The speaker is an executioner/technician in a lab coat that's as blindingly white as everything else here that isn't made of stainless steel.

"You can get into the cabins or be put there by force." A new voice, female: the man's dæmon. Cougar.

_Cooperate or not?_ he asks Minerva.

_Cooperate. If we're going to die, we're not going to do it sick and senseless._

She has a point: he doesn't want his last thought as a complete person to be how much he wants to vomit. Better to be able to think a little more clearly, manage words.

He straightens up to let her off his lap, somehow manages to get to his feet. Walks to the steel-mesh cage (he refuses to dignify it with any other word) and gets in, leans to brace himself against the wall. Watches Minerva walk with grace he can't into the cage across from his and listens to the high, cold sound of metal on metal as the cages are locked.

Between, everything that makes them human.

And a blade, poised to fall.

He wrenches his gaze away from it and holds Minerva's eyes as switches are flipped and machinery starts to hum.

_We're right, _she tells him, and under the pain and terror is certainty. He reaches for that and clings. _We're_ right_, and that's the most important thing._

He manages the ghost of a smile, remembering how that conviction gave her form. Remembering fragments of puzzles and epiphanies.

_Always, _he confirms.

There's a horrible whooshing sound as the blade's edge cuts air.

Then an inferno of pain that devours his heart.

A shared scream.

And all-consuming loss.

**Something's Wrong**

Chase enters the Diagnostics office, Kylie3 at his side, and sinks into his usual chair at the conference table. Even a few hours in the clinic is tiring—not just because of the monotony—and he wants things back to normal.

All is quiet in the office and the corridor outside, even when he listens through Kylie's ears (dingoes are known for their acute hearing). It shouldn't be that way—wouldn't be, if House were here, because surely he'd be making some kind of noise. Even the portable TV House watches when he broods would be a welcome distraction; would help take his mind off his worry.

It's been two days since the Consistorial Court sent House home, but there hasn't been any word from him. For what's perhaps the tenth time, he moves toward the phone, is about to pick it up and begin to debate with himself whether to call or not when it rings, and both he and Kylie look up in surprise.

He answers, the usual, "Diagnostics office," and Wilson's voice replies.

"Chase?" There's a…strained quality in his tone, something raw and aching, and Chase reaches with his free hand for Kylie and threads his fingers through the thick ruff of fur at her neck, because nothing good could possibly cause Wilson to sound like that. "Do you have a few minutes?

"I haven't had anything to do since House left," he answers, sitting down on the nearest chair. Kylie rests her head on his lap, holds his eyes. "Will he be back soon, or…?"

He doesn't want to consider 'or': certain of the Church's arms habitually inflict torture and worse, and the Consistorial Court is among them.

"I don't think so," Wilson says. His voice is even, too even; there's something brittle in it that wants to shatter into a cry, and Chase feels dread coil around his heart and squeeze. "If I can get him into a good long-term care facility—but he'd never have wanted that, and anyway they probably won't accept—"

"Doctor Wilson, _what did they do_?" he demands. If Wilson's talking about House like he's dead—but he isn't, can't be, because then there wouldn't be any question of care—

"Intercision. On the heresy charge."

Kylie howls, not full volume but close enough to lessen his urge to scream. Bile rises in his throat, hot and bitter. "God. _God_," he says, and the words don't contain even a fraction of his horror: the idea of House's vibrant spirit destroyed so utterly is sickening.

He closes his eyes, tries to steady his breathing, ground himself, because he cannot afford intense emotional upheaval, especially not within glass walls. "There might be something that could help," he says, impulsively deciding that the risk is worth it if it can make House whole again. "There's a witch clan a few miles from here; a few witches will sometimes help humans."

A long silence. "And they might be able to…"

"Witches work with energy. The bond they cut was energy; maybe it could be put back together somehow. There's a lot that can be done with magic."

Guarded hope. "How do you even know this? Witches don't—"

"My mum was. I know…not much, not enough, but more than most people do. And maybe…" He trails off, gives Wilson directions to the clan's territory. "Let me know how it goes?"

"He will. Or won't, depending." A pause. "Chase…thank you."

He hangs up before Chase can answer.

Now there's nothing to do but wait. And hope.

Maybe…just maybe the chance he's taken will be enough.

**Curiouser and Curiouser**

When he comes in to work this morning, Kylie loping easily alongside him, House is seated in the conference room, Minerva curled up beneath his left hand.

Self-comforting behavior. Not surprising, given the events of the previous week.

He feels the subtle energy shift as colors flare into place around both man and dæmon, House's usual cocktail: bright yellow and dark orange, streaked with red (bright and dull); and Chase is immeasurably relieved to see a dyadic band, gold and silver entwined, connecting his heart to Minerva's4.

Dyadic, not triadic. _Like Mum's with Zeru, _Kylie says. _Missing the distance-strand._

_I guess it's only possible to restore so much,_ he says, and opens the door. Kylie enters ahead of him, takes a place beside his preferred chair, and House looks up, intense blue eyes meeting his in a penetrating stare.

He nods acknowledgement of the other man and sits down. _ Any idea what's going on here?_

_No, but she's watching me like he's watching you. The 'fascinating puzzle' look…and something else I can't quite—_

"Wilson said you were the one who told him to take us to the witches," House says.

"Yes. And?"

Minerva's gaze shifts from Kylie to him, and she moves a little nearer the edge of the table. For propriety's sake, he scoots his chair back. "And if not for that we'd be worse than dead. So…thank you." She reaches out, one hand-like paw resting briefly atop Kylie's head, and Chase is surprised by the genuine gratitude, respect, even _affection_ he senses in the contact.

"You're welcome," Kylie says.

In the silence, his witch-sight recedes again, and he looks up at House. "Do we have a case?"

"No. But I have questions." A vague gesture encompasses Minerva, clarifies he means 'I' in totality. "You never said your mother was a witch."

"You never asked," he says calmly. Another short pause as he considers, weighs the risk. "It's safer for us both if you don't."

"They won't bother cutting us again," House says, and Minerva flinches, though whether at the word or the memory it evokes he can't guess. "That's corrective. If we screw up a second time, they'll shoot me and be done with it. And you…" He shrugs. "You're obviously not going to tell, and we've said everything we have to say to them."

There's a glint of satisfaction in Minerva's eyes. "Here's hoping it seared their oh-so-holy ears forever."

He's blank-faced, but they can see Kylie's grin. "Why does it matter if we tell you or not?" she asks.

"We need to know," Minerva replies. All the mirth is gone now, and her tone is serious bordering on grim. "It's who we are. If we let them take that from us, we might as well still be dead."

He nods slowly. "All right."

"What was a half-witch doing in the church?"

He laughs humorlessly. "Figures you'd ask the question with my life story wrapped around it."

House might have smirked before, self-satisfied, or made some smart remark. Today he does neither. "Whatever protection you had from seminary, last week was the end of it. They kill relapsed heretics."

Technically, there can be no relapse where there was no belief in the first place, but better to be _relapsa_ and killed than severed on charges of heresy. "And having earned one death sentence, what's a few more?"

"Essentially my logic, yeah."

Another pause. It's infinitely safer to keep his head down and his mouth shut, but…

But it's been so long since he's been able to share this secret with anyone. And keeping it alone is a heavy burden to bear. "After work," he says. "It's mad enough to discuss this at all and worse to do it here."

There would have been protests once, a glib dismissal of his caution; but House just nods.

He'll never be as reckless as he was before. Not now that he's experienced hell made real.

He reaches for Kylie and strokes her fur, trying to lull himself into calm.

Head down. Mouth shut. It's a necessary lesson, but he can't think for a second that it was worth the price.

**No Greater Love**

"Remind me again why we're doing this?" He normally speaks to Kylie mind-to-mind, but they're the only one in the car, so filling the silence is preferable.

"Besides the fact that we've gone mental?"

"Yes."

"Because it's safe to tell him if it is to tell anyone," she says, "and we know he's not going to let it go. He'll keep pushing—"

"Until the puzzle pieces fall into place," he finishes for her, decelerating and making a left. "Thank Goddess for that. If he hadn't been interested, then it would've been reason to worry."

"Right turn," she says. They drive a little farther in silence, and when he brakes for a light, she says, "Minerva's never done that. Not in all the years we've—"

"He'd been as vulnerable as he's ever going to get, Ky," Chase says. "After that, admitting he gives a damn about us was worth getting…whatever information he was looking for."

"He does care."

He's silent for a moment, remembering precisely how that caring felt—wishing he could read its shades and qualities as clearly as he can personality, moods and signs of injury. "Yeah. But the line where caring about the puzzle stops and caring about us starts would be hard to find. It's all twisted up, for him. Always has been."

Shifting the car into park, he turns it off, undoes his seatbelt and Kylie's—modified for her shape—and gets out and heads into the vestibule, his dæmon at his heels. Through her ears he can hear the piano, some intricate classical composition played in an unsettling minor key.

They stand there for a bit, listening, because in its own way this is as much of a signpost as any aura, and what it says is 'anxiety.'

He can understand that.

Wilson answers his knock and lets them in, and although he hadn't expected Wilson to be here, he also hadn't expected him _not_ to be here, as disastrous as this could turn out for all of them.

Oddly enough, once they're inside and the door closed behind them he feels calmer: this is the atmosphere of his childhood, storytelling and conspiracy and the omnipresent knife-edge threat of being found out. It's tense, but it's familiar.

The piano falls to a crashing silence, and House moves from the piano bench to the couch, Minerva in his arms and his gaze daring Chase to acknowledge the fact.

He knows better.

Wilson sits down beside House, Rona5 in front of them both in a sentinel's pose. Golden eyes watch him warily: she's not guarding either of them from him, because there aren't any threat signals coupled with the vigilance, but her body language says that Wilson's hardly calm.

Not surprising. This isn't a reaction to him; it's a reaction to knowing they've all committed enough heresies to be killed on the spot.

_You're only a heretic, _Kylie murmurs,_ if you get caught._

And the public eye—human collective and glass camera lens—can't see them here. He sits down with them in the empty space nearest House, Kylie climbing up to lounge half on his lap and half on the arm of the couch.

Colors flash on—it happens when he watches people for any length of time, although when it activates itself it's hard to guess when it'll subside again—and he notes that nothing's changed in House's signature before shifting his attention to Wilson's. Yellow and green, primarily; light and deeper blue, some brown at the feet (which is a good sign; House will need someone who's grounded)6.

And at his heart…

Two strands: one silver, one gold. The third, the warm, almost coppery brown that forms the physical link, is gone.

Physics and magic agree that energy can't be created or destroyed. But it can change. It can be tapped and moved.

_Holy Mother, _Kylie whispers, and he feels his breathing hitch. Sacrifice like that is the strongest magic—even the Church acknowledges it. _Agape_: selfless love.

Selfless, and the most terrifying risk. If the wrong strand had broken—or no, not _broken_; this was more like transplantation, giving a measure of energy to recreate what had been destroyed. But if something had gone wrong, if either of the other strands had been damaged, they'd have lost the ability to feel together, or to think with one mind; and that's provided they weren't killed outright by the shock—

"Chase!" House's voice.

He looks up sharply, concentration broken, and—for once at a convenient time—human perception reasserts itself.

"You were staring," House says, and Chase hears the weight of calculation in the phrase. "And until I snapped at you, you were unresponsive." A pause. "Do I get an explanation, or do I need to give a diagnosis?"

"Sorry," he says automatically. Then, realizing an apology isn't what House wants, he says, "I can see auras. Sometimes. It comes and goes, but when it's on, it's easy to get distracted."

"What did you see?"

"I see it as color—"

"No," House breaks in. "I meant, what did you see that shocked the hell out of you?"

"Where the energy came from," Kylie says, "that put you back together."

Rona's eyes meet Minerva's. "We couldn't do anything else."

_Greater love hath no man than this__7__. _ He'd memorized the words in seminary long ago, but until this moment he never understood them. Not with the clarity of a living illustration.

"Meaning you take after your mother," House surmises. The awkward silence that had been pressing in on them is gone now, and Chase can see the beginnings of the animation elicited only by puzzle pieces. "But witches' sons are supposed to be human."

"'Supposed to be' as the operative phrase," he says. "And I am, mostly. But what I'm able to do, I can because Mum saw fit to throw tradition out."

"So…what? A little hocus-pocus while you were in utero to stack the odds?" House's expression is quizzical. "Was there a good reason for that, or did she just really, really want to pass down the cauldron and broomstick?"

"Cloud-pine branch," he corrects automatically. "And yeah, she had a good reason." _ Can you?_ he asks, and Kylie obligingly takes over.

Some things are still painful in the telling.

"Our father was a controlling bastard," she says bluntly. "And that Mum fell in love with him in the first place is all the proof we need that love's blind. He made her promise to recant everything that made her who she was, and they married, and she pretended to be human."

House is quiet, the look on his face almost…sympathy?

"She couldn't have kept that up forever," Wilson says.

"No," he agrees. "It made her miserable. So when she was expecting—"

"She made sure you'd be like her," House says. "Or at least close enough that there'd be an opportunity to let the mask drop."

He nods. "He was almost never home for very long, so it was easy to hide what she'd done."

"Especially when he didn't give enough of a damn when he _was_ home to pay attention," House mutters. Then, at Chase's questioning look, "He flew across the goddamn Pacific and hardly noticed you; what was I supposed to think? He was an idiot then and a worse idiot when he called and told me not to hire you in the first place."

Kylie grins their satisfaction. "Which's why you did?"

"I don't like to be told 'no,'" House says. "And it made you interesting. Although"—a measuring look, tinged with approval—"I didn't think _this_ interesting."

Wilson shakes his head, affects a commiserating expression. "Translated from House to English, you'll never know a moment's peace again."

"I'm not sure I'll know the difference," he says dryly. He's pleased, though, because he's heard the banter between them hundreds of times and realizes that they're opening it a bit to include him.

Seeing Minerva fidgeting and recognizing House's impatience, he continues, "I was…probably about five when I walked in on Mum in Circle in the living room…"

**By Hidden Quintessence**

_He stretches and yawns, feels Kylie's warm weight resting on his chest, her glider__8__ form's nails prickling a little through his shirt. She nudges his face with her nose. "You sleeping?"_

"_No. 'M done." Mummy said he had to have a nap and he had one. She didn't say how long for, so now that he's awake, he's staying up._

_He sits up and gets out of bed, laughing as Kylie launches herself from his shoulder to the bookcase, the loose skin between front and hind legs filling with air like the sheets do when Mummy hangs them on the line outside._

_He can climb after her now—well, sort of; it's hard to climb with arms and legs and he's just started to manage the tree in the yard; and no matter how he tries, he can't make his body change like hers to help._

_He thinks it's unfair, but she says he's not supposed to be able to do that, and Zeru agrees with her. "Want a story?" she asks. "Mummy'll read us one if we ask."_

_He can mostly read by himself now, except for a couple of hard words, but it's still better when Mummy reads to him. He looks through the books and picks the one with the glider on the cover—he likes when Kylie matches the pictures—tucking it under his arm. She jumps down to his shoulder, and they move into the living room, where he gasps and drops the book._

_There's an upside-down bowl of silvery light taking up most of the floor, all the way up to the ceiling and bigger across than he could reach even on tiptoes with his arms stretched out. It shimmers like a bubble, and inside it…_

_Mummy. He moves a little closer. Her eyes are closed, but she's sitting up, so she can't be asleep, and she's wearing a dress that looks like it's made of red ribbon, and no shoes, and—_

_And where's Zeru__9__? Not on her shoulder and not flying over her head, and one without the other is _wrong_, scarier than shadows in the dark at night, like a bad dream except that he's awake—he feels himself shaking and Kylie creeping under his shirt, her heart too fast just like his, and he shouldn't because half-Mummy will hear him but he can't help it—_

_He starts to cry, terrified noisy sobs, and the next thing he knows he's being picked up—he shrieks and flails, but the arms around him are strong and carry him through a hole in the bubble, waving a hand so it closes up after them._

"_It's all right," comes Mummy's voice. Her hand rubs gentle circles on his back, and tingling warmth washes through him, taking some of the fear away: her sound and smell and feel are right, even if that one horrible thing is wrong— "It's all right, love; shh. Shh."_

_He presses his face into her shoulder and goes limp against her when he hears Zeru's wings. Kylie drops down his back to the floor, leaving a trail of light scratches, and he feels his heart skip as she changes, lifts his face to see she's a bird, like Zeru but smaller; and feeling Zeru preen Kylie's feathers means everything's okay again. He gives a watery sniff and scrubs the tears off with his shirtsleeve._

"_There." Mummy's voice is very soft. "I didn't mean to scare you, Robbie."_

"_I wasn't scared," he says, feeling ashamed of himself for crying when it was just Mummy all along. "I was surprised."_

"_It was very loud surprise, then," she says, and smiles, letting her arms fall and moving so he can find his favorite spot on her lap. He looks up at the curve of the bubble over them, the bright walls all around._

"_Where did the—this thing come from?" he asks, pointing at it. "Is it yours?"_

_He feels her straighten up, draw in a quick breath like he does when Kylie changes several times fast. "You can see the Circle?" Her voice sounds…excited, proud, like the first time he climbed all the way to the top of the backyard jungle gym, only more. He frowns._

"_It's not a circle," he says. "It's a bowl, like this." He gets off her lap and turns to face her, traces the shape of the curved top in the air with his hands._

"_I call it a Circle," Mummy says, "because the shape on the floor is a circle, even if the whole thing makes a ball-shape."_

_He looks, and yes, they are in the middle of a circle. But… "It looks like a bowl, not a ball."_

"_You're only seeing half of it," she explains. "The other half goes down through the floor and closes under it. See?" She moves her hand in the air in a straight line, and he can see the same silvery light following her fingers, a drawing in the air. (He hopes he can learn to do that, because it looks more interesting than what he can do with crayons.) "Imagine this is the floor. Then this"—she traces a curve above the line, making the bowl-shape—"is the part of the Circle we're sitting in, and here's the rest underneath."_

_She waves away the picture, and he moves to the edge of the Circle and reaches out, then looks back at her. Mummy says to ask before he touches her things. "Can I?"_

"_Yes, but gently," she says, moving to sit down next to him again, "so your fingers don't go through."_

_He's careful, touching the light with just the tips of his fingers, lightly, like he pets Kylie when she's very small. "It's warm!" he says. "And it sort of tickles." Letting his hand drop, he moves to lean against Mummy's side and pulls her arm around him. He's calm now, and Kylie changes into a cat, white and brown and reddish, and purrs. "Did you buy it?"_

_She laughs. "No, Robbie. I made it."_

"_What's it for?"_

"_For keeping safe in," Mummy says, "and to do magic."_

"_Like in the story about the gliders?" Kylie asks, looking up at her. "Daddy said that wasn't real."_

"_Not magic like that," Zeru says. "Different magic. And it is real. Rowan doesn't always tell the truth."_

_He knows 'Rowan' means Daddy, just like he's Robbie and Mummy is Andromeda, except when he tries to say that his voice slips and gets it a little wrong: big words are like that sometimes. "Daddy lied?"_

_Lying is bad, and Daddy isn't supposed to be bad. But Daddy does things that are bad, like yelling at Mummy and making her sad so she almost cries._

_He doesn't know what he thinks of Daddy. Kylie doesn't like Vendula__10__, and Mummy…_

_Mummy is supposed to love Daddy, isn't she?_

He's supposed to love her, too, _Kylie says in his head,_ but he's mean to her. And if Mummy says so, he lied.

"_Yes, he did," Mummy says._

"_He's not s'posed to."_

"_It wouldn't be the first thing he's done that—" Zeru begins, but Mummy shushes him._

"_I'm something called a witch," she says, holding him a little more tightly. She sounds very serious now, so he snuggles in closer, because that tone could mean a good thing or a bad thing and he's not sure which. "That means that I can do magic, and make things like the Circle."_

_He's heard a little about witches from Daddy and in church—not good things, but church is boring and Daddy lies and he knows Mummy is good, so if Mummy is a witch, witches must be good. "And other things too?"_

_She nods. "And other things, too." She's quiet for a minute, then, "I want to teach you to do those things."_

"_But witches are s'posed to be girls," he says. Kylie mews disappointment. "And I'm a boy." He frowns, thinks it over. "Kylie's a girl. You could teach her." And then he can learn from her, because he knows what she knows, and Mummy doesn't have to break the rules._

_At least, he thinks that's probably a rule._

"_No, my bright one," Mummy laughs. "I can teach you. Because you're special."_

_She's said that before when he's learned new things, but today it sounds different. More important. "Why?"_

"_Because when you were little—"_

"_When I was a baby?"_

"_Even before that," Mummy says, "when you were getting ready to be born. I wanted you to be able to do magic, so I made sure you could. As a present."_

_He feels a little thrill of excitement. "Do I get to open it now?" He hopes so, because he really _wants _it, and it wouldn't be fair for her to tell him and then make him wait._

_Mummy's smiling like she does when he doesn't quite understand a grown-up thing. "It's already open," she says, and taps his chest, right over his heart. "Inside you. It's how you can see the Circle, and how you'll learn to see other things."_

"_And do things?"_

"_And do things," she promises, "but not right away. It takes a long time to learn to do it right, and you'll have to be patient."_

_He and Kylie both sigh, because 'patient' is another word for having to wait._

"_There's just one thing you have to promise me," Mummy says. "And that's that you won't tell Daddy about the Circle, or that you have magic inside you. What we do in here"—she points at the curving light around them—"has to stay in here, no matter what. Your secret and mine."_

"_We promise," Kylie says._

_Mummy is quiet for a moment, then, "Do you want to hear a story, love?"_

"_Is it a story about magic?"_

"_It's about the Goddess," she says, "who's an important part of magic."_

_He frowns, thinking of church. "Is Goddess like God?"_

"_Goddess is Mother the way God is Father," Zeru says, and Mummy begins a story about them and how they love each other, and changing seasons that go in a circle forever._

**Mend and Heal**

"Did she make that Circle because she needed it, or was she just asking to be caught?" House asks.

"A little of each, I think," he says. "She wasn't using the Circle as workspace, but the…atmosphere in a Circle is soothing; it feels safe. Part of the reason she brought me into it was to get that effect." A pause. "And yes, she probably knew I wouldn't sleep for long and there was a good chance I'd see her like that and give her an opportunity to explain what she was and what she'd done."

"And letting you see her without her dæmon?" House looks disapproving, but given what he's been though and how he must take the idea of seeing someone that way, it's not a surprise.

"I got used to it," he says, "once I realized she was still herself whether he was with her or not. And any rate, witches have different ideas of acceptable distance."

"Are they born with the ability to move apart that way?" Wilson asks. "Or…?"

"No," he says, shaking his head. "It's an ordeal they go through—around the time their dæmons are about to settle." He pauses, thinking back: Mum had never said very much about this. "There are places in the world that are—dead, in a way that means dæmons can't go into them and humans can. Moving apart in a place like that snaps the distance-strand and leaves the rest."

Rona and Minerva both make distressed sounds. "That's brutal!" Minerva says.

"It's the price to pay for the things they'll see and learn once they can travel separately," Kylie replies. "Everything that matters stays intact. And we really did get used to it, once they explained how it worked."

House nods, though whether in acknowledgement or acceptance he can't guess. "And she started out by teaching you religion?"

"Context matters," he says lightly. "And those stories were preferable to being dragged to church." Fortunately, that hadn't happened except on the rare occasion his father happened to be around on a Sunday.

"Do you believe it? God, Goddess, cycles of nature and whatever?"

"House." There's a note of reproof in Wilson's tone, but House—being House—is shameless.

"It's a valid question. Get one set of messages from Dad and one from Mom, there's going to be a lot of conflict, but sooner or later, something's going to sink in and stick."

"I believe what she taught me," he says simply. "You're right; of course I questioned it growing up, because I did get exposure to mainstream beliefs through school and so on—but by the time I got out of the church, I didn't want anything to do with Christianity." He laughs, a little bitterly. "And to this day my concept of God is screwed up." He'd experienced so much pain because of his earthly father that the concept of a divine one simply doesn't compute.

"So you adopted a goddess archetype as a surrogate after losing your mother."

"I find it comforting, which is ultimately why anyone believes anything."

House seems to accept that. "So how'd you end up in the church in the first place? If you absorbed your mother's belief system, it sure as hell wouldn't've been your idea."

"It wasn't," he says. "But the story'll make more sense if you let me go in sequence."

"Okay," House says. "So—after instilling the idea of divinity and probably an ethical code as a control mechanism, she moved on to…what?"

"Teaching me to see things and explaining what they meant," he says, "and then rudimentary energy-work, which is where you start from before you can actually do anything. A lot of it's like meditation—center yourself and focus, that sort of thing. I cast my first Circle between six and seven somewhere"—he smiles at the memory; it had been the first time he'd produced a visible result and he'd been so pleased with himself—"and then from there I had the idea, so she started teaching me healing."

House's gaze intensifies, and he can feel Minerva's eyes on him, too. Then Wilson's and Rona's. He fidgets a little, chooses his words carefully, because the last thing he wants is to give false hope. "It was something she was good at, so if I'd inherited anything it was likely to be there. Still…even if I'd had a lot more training than I ever will, I'll never have the ability level she did. She could heal—I was only ever able to ease pain, and then not for more than two or three hours at a stretch."

There's a pause. Wilson's eyes settle on House, silently asking the same question that's in his own head. Finally—

"Show me." It's quiet, but there's something there that's challenge and demand and hope all at once, and he knows just how much House wants to hide that last.

"We can try," Kylie says for him. "We're out of practice—we haven't done this since Mum died; we can't promise—"

"I'm not asking you to promise anything. If it works, great; if it doesn't, that's what I have Vicodin for."

He sees Wilson wince, and his stomach clenches. House's pain is very real—he's never doubted that; he can see it just as clearly as the cane and the limp—but the cumulative hepatic damage wrought by so much acetaminophen…

The Vicodin is necessary. It's also toxic.

Kylie gets down from the sofa to stand on a patch of floor that isn't occupied by furniture, books, journals or loose papers. He rises, takes his place beside her. "Just…I need quiet for a few minutes first."

There's no protest, so he closes his eyes. _Talk me through it?_ He could do it alone, but it'll be simpler, faster, more familiar to take directions.

_Ground and center, _she says. _The tree of life meditation used to work best._

It was also the first one they learnt: he remembers his mother's voice, soft and low as he did his best to think of feet as roots and arms as branches, and his breathing falls almost automatically into the slow, deep rhythm she'd taught them.

_Down, down, down, down…_

Inhale…exhale…inhale…

Roots, bands of light extending from the soles of his feet, the base of his spine, and reaching downward. He sees them behind closed eyes, anchoring themselves to the soil, pushing through, in, down. Deeper and deeper, past the surface and into the center, into the source.

_Draw that energy up with each breath._

He knows he's tapped in because the sensation is familiar, tingling heat beginning at the roots and reaching up, flooding his body until he feels like a living circuit, a wire humming with electricity. But despite the power flowing through him, inside he's calm. Still.

He draws one last deep breath and opens his eyes, notes with some interest (and a little dismay, because he doesn't need distractions) that his witch-sight is back on: House and Minerva are wreathed in bright color.

Moving back to the couch, he sits down beside House, and Minerva moves off to one side—still within House's reach, but not too close. Chase looks down, forces himself not to grimace at the black stain against an otherwise brilliant aura. Kylie whines in sympathy, but besides glancing at her, House doesn't react.

He directs the energy he's drawn up into his hands, feels them heat and the tingling sensation intensify so much they nearly shake. A glance down reveals coronas of vibrant blue-green: life, growth, healing.

He reaches forward, suspends both hands just above House's thigh—contact might make it easier, but he knows this is intimate enough without touch; he's not going to push it—and focuses that healing energy into the concavity in the flesh, closing his eyes again.

It's a crevasse of scarring lined with screaming nerves, misfiring pain signals surging to cut like knives. He knows now that beneath the black he can't see through is red—not the red of vitality, but the inflammation of a gaping wound.

But soon he can feel the nerves quiet, the jagged energies of pain receding and finally vanishing. He can, at least, bind back the agony for a while.

_Thank you, Mother. _ He's not sure whether he means his or the Great Mother—perhaps both. Sighing deeply, he lets his hands fall to his sides, lets excess energy drain back whence it came and the metaphysical taproot dissipate.

_You're tired,_ Kylie observes.

_Very, _he says. But it's a good kind of tired, the satisfaction of a job well done, and sure enough, when he opens his eyes there's a small but genuine smile on House's face, and the lines pain has etched there have smoothed out. "All right?"

House lets go of his cane and stands up, reflexively favoring his left leg at first but gradually shifting half his weight to the right; and when he takes a few experimental steps, there's no trace of the limp. "Yes," he says after a moment, and Minerva adds, "Thank you," as he sits back down, climbing onto his lap. This time, he notices, she doesn't relegate herself to the left leg.

"You're welcome," Kylie replies, and that that's _twice_ in one day House has thanked him and meant it: any moment now, surely, the pope is going to get on the television and announce that the seas have turned to blood.

"It doesn't hurt at all?" Wilson asks. He hears hope, wonder, a sort of guarded joy.

House shakes his head. "It hasn't been this good since the ketamine failed. Temporary, but I'd say that's offset by the lack of potential brain damage." He looks to Chase. "Two or three hours?"

He nods, and Wilson catches his eye and murmurs a fervent, "Thank you."

"How long did it take you to learn that?" House asks after a moment.

"A couple of years. I was…nearly ten by the time I was any good at it." And that'd been frustrating as anything: Mum had done so much more and so easily, and it hadn't taken him long to figure out he had only a half-measure of ability at his disposal.

"They sound like they were good years, though," Wilson says.

"Parts of them," he allows. "But the older I got, the more I had to notice what was wrong. Unhappy at five was pushing depressed by ten, and I wasn't the only one reading the warning signals…"

**Coming a Terrible Storm**

_Dad's out again—yet another conference, and Robert is grateful: if Mum's depressed when he's gone, it's worse when he's home._

_One thing to ignore them by not being there; another to be there and do it on purpose. Oh, he'll promise all kinds of things—'We'll have a night out, Anne,'—he never uses her proper name—'just the two of us.' Or sometimes it'll be, 'Of course I'd love to come to your football match, Robert,' but he never, never follows through._

_Robert's learnt his father's word isn't worth anything, and that takes some of the sting out of the disappointment. Mum still feels it full-strength, because a long time ago—before there was a marriage or Robert was even planned—Dad made promises and kept them._

_At least, she says that's how it was. It's hard to imagine, but there has to be some reason she married him in the first place._

Love is blind, _Kylie says, her cat's eyes glowing like twin lamps in the dark._ It makes you marry people you shouldn't even trust.

_In Mum's stories, the God and Goddess love each other, and neither one of them gets locked up and controlled by the other. They're equals._

_Maybe that's how love's _supposed _to be, but it's not how it actually works: he knows deep down that marrying Dad, staying with him, was the most stupid thing Mum ever did._

_She's never been happy, really—well, when she's being herself, teaching him in Circle—then she's happy. But all the rest of the time she's too quiet, looks sad. Zeru spends more and more time away from her—"Visiting my sisters," she says—and it's rare that he finds them together when he gets home from school._

_She's not sleeping well, either: he went to bed at least an hour ago, but he can hear her moving around downstairs, even without using Kylie's ears; and it's been that way all week. But tonight…_

She's talking to someone,_ he says, straining to catch the sound of the second, unfamiliar voice. It's quiet, but Kylie can tell it's male and pick up the rises and falls. They're not close enough to get the words. _ Come on, _he tells her, slipping as quietly as he can out of bed. _ I want to hear.

_They pad into the hallway, and Kylie moves to the top of the stairs. Now the words are clear, not just the tones._

"—_romeda, please!" It's the male voice speaking, low but intense, and he guesses it's one of her sisters' dæmons. "What in Artemis' name are you staying for?"_

_Definitely one of her sisters' dæmons: her clan uses the Greek names for the Goddess and God. Tradition, rooted in something to do with the history between England and Australia (he hadn't paid complete attention when she'd explained it)._

"_It would be one thing if the man were reasonable," the dæmon continues, "but he has you all but _locked up _in this damned—"_

"_You know exactly why I'm staying, and you can tell Callisto: Rowan has nothing to do with it and hasn't for years."_

"_Then it's the child."_

_He creeps a little closer, reaches out to pet Kylie's fur, satin-soft warmth under his hand. They're talking about him, and it makes him nervous._

"_I don't owe my husband anything, but I _won't _walk out on Robert. He needs me and I need him."_

"_So take him with you!" the dæmon insists. "He doesn't care about his father any more than you do; he's not going to fight about it. Tell him to get his things together, wrap him up warm and come home."_

"_We can't." Zeru's voice now, mixed frustration and pain. "Rowan—he'd come home and find us gone eventually. He might let us go, but he'd have us hunted down if we took Robert, too."_

_Then it's his fault: he's the one she's staying for; _he's_ the reason she's miserable. He takes Kylie into his arms, clutches her against him and tries to swallow the painful lump in his throat._

"_Then hunt_ him_ first," the dæmon says coldly. "You could do it any number of ways—cut his throat, take your bow and shoot him—or if you want to be subtle, there're foxgloves in the yard; make a strong tea of the leaves of the upper stem and his heart would__11__—"_

"_I'm not going to murder my husband just because I'm homesick!"_

"_You're not homesick, you're_ heartsick_—and if you don't stop this charade and remember who and what you really are, the captivity is going to kill you."_

_He bites his lip hard to stifle a cry, thinks that if it's going to be a choice between Mum's life and Dad's—well, that's no choice at all._

We're the only one stopping her, _Kylie says. _ So…maybe we can convince her to go. Without us.

_The idea of Dad as his only parent until he's old enough to go to university and take care of himself makes him feel sick, but he'd rather have Mum gone and alive, and she could send Zeru to visit him sometimes… And he can go back to her once he's grown up, because then Dad won't have a say in what he does._

_It'll be all right._

"_I appreciate your concern," Mum says in clipped tones, "but this is my life now and I'm _not _turning away from it."_

"'_Meda…" The dæmon's voice is pleading, but Mum won't budge._

"_Go," Zeru says. "We love you and we know you mean well, but—go."_

_He doesn't hear the rustle of departing wings, but the dæmon must have left, because he hears Mum shutting the window with a scrape and a clunk as it settles into the frame. He lets Kylie go, and they move downstairs. Mum hears them and looks up._

"_Robert? What are you doing up? You were supposed to be in bed over an hour ago—"_

"_You were talking," he says. "I didn't recognize the voice."_

"_Aeolus__12__," Mum says, sinking onto a chair. Zeru rises to perch on its arm. "My sister Callisto's dæmon. A raven," she adds as an afterthought._

_He sits down on the ottoman in front of the chair, and Kylie springs lightly onto his lap. His stomach feels like it's tied in a knot, and he knows she's tempted to take her glider shape and hide, reflecting his fear. "We were listening when you were talking to him," she says instead. "And he was right. You should go."_

"_Oh, Robert…" She reaches forward, clasps his shoulder. "Callisto means well, really, but she's not always—"_

"_She_ is _right!" He shrugs her hand off, surges to his feet so Kylie falls to the floor, whisper-light as she lands on her paws. "You're_ miserable _in this house; and if your sisters aren't here enough to see it, I bloody well am!"_

"_Language," Zeru chides, but he's not listening. His heart skips and Kylie's a dingo, fur bristling and teeth bared._

"_You're not supposed to be stuck inside pretending to be what you're not! And except when we're in Circle, you're—"_

"_Robert—"_

"—_sticking everything that's important to you in the closet, like it doesn't even matter—"_

"_Of course it matters!" she says sharply, shocking him silent. Then, letting the edge go out of her tone, "It matters. But whatever else I am, I will always be your mother first. And I will not walk or run or fly away from that."_

"_Not even to save your life?"_

_She sighs. "Robert, Callisto's always been a bit dramatic. It's nothing to worry a—"_

"_But what if she's right?" he shouts. "What if she's right and you just let him keep you in here like—like_ furniture _or something and _die_ because you were too stubborn to get out when you had the chance?"_

_She's reaching out again, trying to gather him close, make him be quiet, but he steps back. Kylie's making an eerie sub-vocal keening sound and he feels himself shaking, like there's something inside him trying to get loose, and he's too upset to ground himself and stop it._

"_If that happens it'll be _my fault_!"_

_And with that the—whatever it is explodes outward, heat and pain and fury, and sends him rocking back on his heels—Kylie howls—and the picture window behind Mum cracks into a billion shards, coating the yard in what looks like fragments of ice._

_For an endless moment everything is dead still, and then the world starts moving again and Mum rises and pulls him against her, her arms as safe a circle as any she's ever cast. His heartbeat catches again, but he doesn't look up to see what Kylie is; it's enough that Zeru's comforting her like Mum is him._

"_Did I do that?" he manages. He's half-afraid of the answer: if he did, what if it happens again?_

"_You always were precocious," Mum says. "Although this is a bit early for active magic…perhaps it's developing differently in you than it generally would. It would balance out the late start…"_

"_You don't know?"_

"_I know how it would go in a girl your age," she says, "but that doesn't seem to be the timetable you're following. So I have to guess a little bit."_

"_But you can fix it?"_

"_The window?" She laughs, shakes her head. "I'm afraid you did too thorough a job on it for that."_

"_Not the window, _us_!" Kylie says. "We were upset and we didn't ground the power and it exploded—"_

"_And that can sometimes happen," Mum says calmly, looking over his shoulder at her. "Especially when you're hurt and angry." Letting him go, she takes his hands, gives them a reassuring squeeze. "When you're a few years older—about when Kylie settles—we'll be able to channel that power into something constructive. For now, though, the best thing to do is let me bind it."_

"_Tie it up?"_

"_Put it away for a while, to keep you and everyone around you safe until you can control it."_

_If it had just been a small thing that'd broken, he might have asked her to let him keep his new ability—some part of him is proud he's managed to actually_ do _something that showed up as more than just energy—but as it is, he knows better: that would be like letting him carry a bomb around. "All right."_

"_Good." Mum steps back, Zeru rising to perch on her shoulder, and he bends down to pick up Kylie. She's in her glider form now: he's not frightened anymore, but when he's calming down she likes to be small enough to fit in his hands._

What's she going to do about the window? _Kylie asks._

She'll come up with something,_ he says._ Dad won't be back for two more days, anyway; there's time.

_Mum leads the way into his room and flicks on the light. "Do you have string somewhere? Knots are the simplest way to do a binding spell."_

"_What about the sewing basket?"_

"_Thread's too fragile," she says._

"_Oh." He pauses, thinking. "I haven't got string, but…" He sets Kylie down and goes over to the closet, pulls out the pair of new (too small) sneakers Dad gave him as an apology for not showing up at last month's school play and holds one up by the laces._

_Mum laughs. "Not quite what I had in mind," she says, "but close enough. You might as well use them for something."_

_He works the lace out of the shoe and gives it to her. She closes her hand around it and murmurs something—probably a consecration, because anything he gets from Dad he automatically hates a little bit._

_His sight flickers as he watches her—he learnt to see auras a little too well; he started about two years ago, and they're bright and clear but he can't control when he sees them and when he doesn't—and he takes in her rainbow, bright yellow and green streaked with red, violet and deep blue. (There used to be silver, but it went away, and when he asked she didn't answer why.)__13_

_The shoelace in her hands has black around it, which he knows is the color for binding._

"_I need you to focus on that power, love. Exactly what it felt like before it broke loose."_

_Kylie scampers up to sit on his shoulder, and he closes his eyes, concentrates on the memory of vibration, heat, control that snapped like a thread—and he feels Mum take his hands, press them together and tie the shoelace around them; then the subtle tugs of a series of knots. She's chanting low under her breath, and this time he can hear:_

"Let this power be restrained until the time it can be trained."

_She repeats that, Zeru's voice joining hers, over and over and faster and faster until the words lose meaning, waver and blur into rhythmic sound; and then there's a little shock of energy like unearthed static. Then they fall silent, Mum's hands dropping, and he opens his eyes to see the loop of the shoelace tied loosely around his own, hints of vibrant red showing through the black. She slips it off and tucks it into a pocket of her dress (hard to see, since these aren't the clothes Dad makes her wear, but she pointed out where they were once). "I'll have to cast that every month or two until we can leave it off, but that's all right; it doesn't take long."_

"_You're sure it's bound tight enough? The shoelace was sort of loose…"_

"_It's just a symbol, Robert," she says with a smile. "There was no need to cut your circulation off to make the spell work." Turning, she pulls his covers back and pats the mattress. "Bed. And stay in it, this time."_

"_Yes, Mum." He gets in, and Kylie changes back into her cat form for sleep—small enough to hold on to comfortably and big enough that he doesn't have to worry about hurting her if he moves around at night. She molds herself to his body and purrs so he can feel the faint, soothing vibration against his own chest, and Mum turns off the light and bends to press a kiss to his cheek._

"_Mum?"_

"_Yes, love?"_

"_I'm sorry I yelled. And I'm sorry about the window."_

_She sits down on the edge of the bed and reaches to rub gentle circles on his back. There's the faint warmth of directed energy, too, carrying feelings of love-warmth-safety, and between that and Kylie's purring, the knot of dread in his stomach unties itself. "The window doesn't matter," Mum says. "I'm sorry I upset you enough that it broke."_

_He's quiet for a long moment, then, "I'm still scared for you."_

_Her hand stills, and she sighs softly. "I wish I could take that fear away. It's not your job to worry about me; it's mine to worry about you."_

_He wants to tell her that that's silly, because he's all right and she's not; she's the one who _needs _worrying about, but he doesn't. "I wish Dad would forget all about us, and you could go home and take me with you."_

_Kylie's eyes can see her smile in the dark, but it doesn't reach her eyes, and her voice is sad. "I know."_

_He swallows hard, makes himself ask, "Was your sister right? Will staying here…?"_

"_No matter what," she says, "I will never leave you."_

_That's not the same as 'No.' That's an answer that sounds like one thing and means something else, and he's not sure what the 'something else' is yet. "Promise?"_

"_Promise," she says, and kisses him again before rising. "I love you, Robert."_

"_I love you, too, Mum."_

_He's about to ask if she'll sing his lullaby for him when the front door bangs open, and Dad's voice carries up the stairs like a crash of thunder or breaking glass. "Anne! What the bloody hell happened to this window?"_

_Robert feels himself tense and Kylie's fur stand on end: why, why did he have to pick _tonight_ to come home early?_

"_No matter what you hear him say," Zeru warns him as Mum leaves the room, "stay in bed and don't make noise." Then he follows her, and Mum shuts the door._

_Robert pulls the covers over his head, but he can still hear Dad's voice._

"_And what are you _wearing_? I told you to give up that heretical nonsense—suppose our son had seen you dressed like a—" He can't even say it. "And breaking the window—how could you possibly have taken that for a sane idea? You might have—"_

"_It was necessary."_

"I _say what is and isn't _necessary_!"_

Sing, please, _he says to Kylie,_ so we can't hear him.

_He feels her nod, and then the lilting notes of Mum's lullaby__14__ begin in his head and blot out everything else. _Moon-glow lights the sky… Night songs play soft and low…

_He doesn't know whether the yelling stops before he falls asleep or after._

**Faith, Hope and Love**

"And you feel guilty she stayed for you," Wilson says.

He doesn't look up, but Kylie nudges his hand and he reaches to stroke her back, trying to calm himself. "Of course I do. It was always in her power to go; the only reason she didn't—"

"Was that she never thought she could," Wilson says simply.

"Of course she did! She—"

"Loved you," he breaks in, still in that same level tone. "And when you love someone enough, you don't care about risks to yourself."

Chase meets his gaze, and Wilson asks, "Did you ever think what would've happened to you if she'd left you with your father?"

He hadn't, actually; but before he can say as much, House answers for him. "The child-safety lock she'd put on your magic wasn't going to last forever. If she'd gone and it had come off and you'd been with him—how long would it really have taken for him to piss you off enough that something else blew up?"

_Hours, _he thinks. _Even less._

House doesn't give him time to dwell on that; they all know the penalties for witchcraft. "Given your perfect control of your temper in face of my best provocation, I'm guessing you never learned to do that spell yourself."

He shakes his head. "Mum couldn't do magic when she was drunk. I had the binding for two or three years after she first cast it, but after that…I learnt to do without it." _Except that once,_ Kylie says grimly. _We could've used it then._

"You learned to put yourself in an emotional choke-collar," House says bluntly.

"It was either that or be a danger to myself, others and any breakable objects I came across."

"Does it go off with any strong emotion, or just anger?"

"Anger's the only one that's problematic. Any other kind of upset ruins what control over the witch-sight I have and throws off my ability to focus on what little magic I can do, but I don't need to worry about making things explode." He's quiet for a moment. "Should I keep going?"

"Take a break," House says. "You want dinner?"

_Wow, _Kylie says. _Taking away the pain puts him in a_ really _good mood. I think we just caught him being hospitable._

He actually should eat; Mum taught him that's what one does after any kind of large-scale work, and he hadn't tried to pull off so much in nearly a decade. "Sure."

House nods, then turns to Wilson. "Are you cooking, or are we ordering out?"

"Cooking," Wilson says. "Remember? I spent an hour last night hunting down your crock-pot and put a stew in early this morning."

"Oh, _that's_ what that was. I thought all the banging around was your goddamn hairdryer blowing a gasket."

"Yes, because hairdryers are notorious for mimicking the melodious calls of kitchen implements."

"It has multiple settings and an attachment-thingy. It can make whatever noise it wants." He narrows his eyes at Wilson and adds, "And at seven A.M., I'm not lucid enough to know what I'm hearing anyhow."

Rona half-bares her teeth, but her eyes are smiling, and Minerva reaches to bat her muzzle with a paw.

_Are we seeing what I think we're seeing? _Kylie asks.

He knows what it _looks_ like: the couples on television, that companionable fairytale image of a husband and wife, bickering without really meaning it. But…isn't that just a fairytale?

_Not with what he did for House, it's not,_ Kylie says. _You risk your soul for someone, it's either out of insanity or love._

And Wilson's not mad.

Goddess, no wonder he'd been in so much pain. Horror enough to lose a friend to that hell, but a partner… Not just someone you cared about, but someone you shared mind and heart, soul and body with…

He thinks back over the times he's seen them together at work—they're careful about personal space there, careful to give the appearance of compliance with societal norms, but with this new lens to look through, suddenly it's obvious that they're closer than mere friends are permitted to be.

"You're together," he says matter-of-factly.

They both tense. House straightens up, lifts his chin, squares his shoulders. "And?"

"And I think you trained him a little too well," Wilson mutters, but House isn't listening.

"Is there something wrong with that?" Narrowed eyes flash, dare him to find out what'll happen if he says 'Yes.'

"No," he says, showing open hands in a pacifying gesture. "I just didn't know, that's all."

Wilson raises his eyebrows, skeptical, but House nods slightly and relaxes. "The pagan system doesn't care."

"No." What it would have found perverted was his parents' relationship, perfection on the surface and twisted into the bars of a cage underneath. "And neither do I."

"'Course not," House says cheerfully. "After all, a male witch is weirder than a same-sex couple."

"Half-witch," he corrects. "I age normally, I can't fly, I haven't been through a witch's ordeal—"

"And yet you're the most effective analgesic since the chemical coma," House says. "Half's enough."

He smiles, pleased, because this is the first time it _has_ been enough: always before, he was too much a witch to be human and too human to be a proper witch.

Sometimes he really has to wonder what Mum had been thinking. He can't imagine being other than what he is and wouldn't really want to be, but it would have taken audacity worthy of House to decide to imbue an unborn son with magical power. Genetics, tradition, history had all said witches' sons were meant to be human, and Mum had tossed it all aside.

After a minute House gets up, Minerva alongside for the first time all night, and he hears the sound of dishes and cutlery rattling around in the kitchen. Wilson turns to him.

"Is it difficult for you to do that?" he asks in a low voice. "Take the pain away?"

"Not as much as I thought it was going to be," Chase answers. "But then, most of the practice I did years ago…his pain's different."

"How so?"

"He didn't bring it on himself," Kylie says. "So the effect might last longer than what we could do for Mum. At least, it was easier in the first place."

"Would you be willing to do it again?" Rona asks.

"If he lets me," Chase says. "It's not that draining, and I don't want him in pain any more than you do." Every Vicodin House takes brings inevitable thoughts of hepatic failure, and if he's plagued by those thoughts, it must be much worse for Wilson. "And it'd probably get easier with enough repetition, so I wouldn't need an entire meditation beforehand."

"This is the happiest I've seen him since…" Wilson doesn't complete the thought, but he doesn't need to. "Thank you."

He looks down. "I wish I could do more. It's not—"

"It's relief that doesn't do damage," Wilson breaks in. "One or two fewer doses of Vicodin, a couple of hours when he's not miserable and won't do crazy, self-destructive things to take his mind off the pain. Don't undervalue that."

House's return with the food, savory meat and vegetables with the utensils dropped unceremoniously into the dishes, saves him having to answer. As they eat (and House was absolutely right that Wilson's an excellent cook), House complains about his clinic patients, Wilson shares a rare success story—a pediatric patient who'll now live to see adulthood—and it's comfortable. He doesn't feel like he's intruding or unwanted.

And by the time the table's cleared and the dinner things put away, he's calm enough to return to the couch and resume.

**Lift Me Up**

_It takes a few months before Dad's sure Mum won't do any more magic, but after a while he resumes his old neglectful patterns. Time passes—six months, a year, two years. Mum smiles less often, almost never laughs; and month by month the brightness of her aura dims._

_He tries to deny what he's seeing, but it's no good: he already knows._

_It's a little better during their lessons; she's more animated, and the energy she takes in from the earth revitalizes her. When she can be herself, she's all right. Mostly._

_He goes into the living room with Kylie in her cat shape padding alongside, wondering what Mum has planned for tonight—she'd mentioned something about divination methods last week, which could be interesting if he could actually—_

_But the Circle isn't up, and Mum's in full regalia: red dress, bare feet, bow and arrows at her back and her hair loose, Zeru perched on one shoulder. In her hands is a branch, fairly thick and as long as she is tall._

_Her eyes are sparkling, alive, and she's smiling the widest he's seen her do in weeks. "Mum? What—?"_

"_Change your clothes," she says, taking in his t-shirt and shorts in a glance. "Jeans and a sweater at least; I'll get your coat and shoes."_

_For one moment he's ecstatic, thinks she's finally seen sense and they're leaving Dad's gilded cage never to return, but then he realizes that, if that were the case, she'd have told him to pack his things, too._

Don't, _Kylie says, stopping him before he can start to brood. His heart skips, and all at once she's a kestrel like Zeru, rising to close sharp talons gently around his arm._ She's happy, and she's taking us flying!

_She's never done that before, and he has to wonder why she is now, but Mum's excitement is catching and he can't dwell for long on the question. He changes his clothes in record time and returns to the living room, stuffing his feet into his shoes and shrugging on his coat. He's too warm now, but he knows why she told him to change: it'll be cold high up, and though she won't feel it, he certainly would._

"_Why the bow and arrows?" he asks._

"_I just wanted them, that's all," she says, and rests the cloud-pine branch against her free shoulder, leading the way to the back door. Then she motions them out ahead of her and locks it behind them._

_It's a warm night, lit by a waxing gibbous moon, and the grass rustles softly with his footsteps. Kylie changes from kestrel to barn owl, shining white feathers touched with gold and gleaming where the moonlight hits, and when he looks through her eyes the darkness is lit up like day, and he can see the individual petals of every flower in Mum's garden from yards off._

_Mum's let the cloud-pine go, and it's suspended in the air beside her at about waist-height; Zeru is already beating his wings, impatient for takeoff. Mum grasps the branch firmly with one hand and swings a leg over, graceful as anything, and although he's never seen her do this, it's clear she's had long experience._

"_Come on, love," she says. Zeru leaves her, catching a cool breeze and flapping noisily upward—he's not built for night flying, really, but there's nothing to be done for that—and Robert grips the branch the way Mum did and tries for a graceful up-and-over motion, but he has neither the height nor the practice, so although he does manage to get on, he's not going to flatter himself and say it was easy._

_He's in front of her, which he's not sure is right—shouldn't the person controlling the branch be in front?—but she just reaches forward and loops an arm around his torso, a strong grip like a seatbelt, which…_

_Suddenly it occurs to him that he's sitting on a branch, no walls or floor or safety features or anything, but before he can get nervous Mum says a strange-sounding word in a commanding tone and they're lifting up, Kylie's wings filling with air as she falls silently into line beside him._

_Higher, higher, and Mum's hold is firm and safe and Kylie's exultant at being a bird so high up—always before, she'd have hit the distance limit dozens of yards ago._

_Mum cries out, a wild, joyous sound and Zeru echoes it with a hunting scream; he can feel her chest shaking with laughter and when colors flare across his vision, he can see a corona of silver at the edges of an aura that's vibrantly bright._

_Kylie wheels around so he can look through her eyes to see Mum's face—she looks fierce and proud and her eyes shine with bliss, and his heart aches because she never looks like that on the ground except for those few moments every esbat__15__ when she draws the moon down__16__ and the Goddess lights her up from inside._

"_What's this like for you?" he asks. She's told him about it, music and starlight and freedom, but he thinks he might understand better from up here, so high that when he looks down he can't see the ground._

_She's quiet, then, "I can show you, I think, for a moment. Close your eyes."_

_He does, and feels her hand come up to cover his heart—there's the familiar tingling warmth of energy flowing through him, and then he feels something deep inside stretch backwards and—_

_And his eyes are still closed but somehow he's seeing out into the night anyway, and he realizes that Mum's pulled a little of his own perception into herself, because suddenly he feels the cold but there's no bite in it, and the night is singing to him like every star has a voice, a chorus of indescribable tones that he's sure no church choir could copy in a billion years, and the moonlight caresses his skin._

_Then she presses him gently back and he opens his eyes with a gasp, heart beating fast because he'd never felt that _alive_ before, that much a part of everything. "Mum…" He tries for words, but doesn't know what to say. If this is what she was, strength and joy and music, how could she possibly have given it up?_

Don't ask her that, _Kylie says. _ We can't convince her not to go back, so let's let her be happy as long as she can and not argue.

"_That was brilliant," he says at last. "Thank you."_

"_You're welcome." The arm around him tightens a little, sort of a hug._

"_Why are we flying tonight?" he asks. "Is there a reason?"_

"_No," she says. "Just that I wanted you to know this about me, and where you come from."_

_He nods, looks into the infinite sky in front of him. "Could we stay up here forever?" He knows they can't, that they'll have to land sooner or later, but he still wishes…_

_Her laugh is tinged with a little sadness now, and she presses a kiss to the back of his head and guides the branch in an upward spiral, larger and larger circles. He watches Kylie and Zeru fly together, tries to hum a piece of the music he heard in the stars and realizes all at once that this is where Mum got his lullaby from, fragments of that music gathered together in a glittering mosaic._

_He wants to go home. Not that horrible house but _her _home, where she belongs and he has a grandmother, aunts, cousins; where magic isn't a shameful thing that has to be hidden and everyone can see and sense the same things he does. Where his father wouldn't be anything more than a bad memory._

I wish…

_But of course they go back to the house eventually, and Mum hides the cloud-pine branch away; and when she comes to tuck him in she's dressed like the human she's not. _

_And the silver in her aura is fading away._

**Empathy**

"I'm guessing that from here there aren't any more happy moments," House says at last.

He shakes his head. "The drinking started not long after that. My father divorced her and walked out when I was fifteen, not long before Kylie settled. I'd hoped she'd get better once the marriage wasn't tying her down anymore, but…"

"Getting rid of the person responsible for the pain doesn't always undo the damage causing it," House says quietly, and Chase remembers listening to that diagnostics class Foreman once made him teach, piecing together the allegory of the leg.

_He knows from experience._

"I never understood…Dad was out of the picture, there was no _reason_—" He breaks off, and Kylie presses herself close. "She stayed for me," he says, "but she couldn't _live_ for me. No matter how much I begged her, she wouldn't stop."

"Not 'wouldn't,'" House corrects. "Couldn't. It wasn't that she didn't care about you or that she didn't want to stay—but at a certain point, when pain is bad enough, when it won't stop, you will do anything—_anything_—not to feel it. No matter who you're hurting or how hard they're trying to save you."

He looks up to meet House's gaze, thinks of pained grimaces and the rattle of pills in an omnipresent bottle. Remembers Mum, staring with glassy eyes into the dregs of a gin and tonic.

It's the same losing battle, even if the pain is different: House's liver will fare no better against toxic amounts of acetaminophen than Mum's did against the alcohol.

_But we can help him, _Kylie says. _ Stop the pain as much as we can, for as long as we can, so he'll take fewer pills._

_Only if he'll let us,_ he says. And he's not sure House will: he hates to be dependent on anything, and while dependency on medication is bad enough, trusting another person so fully would be anathema.

But…

But all their lives are tangled and woven together now, steel-strong microfilament secrets, and he's let House see enough of his own pain that perhaps…perhaps House might be able to trust him. Perhaps enough vulnerability on both sides will strike a balance and cancel itself out.

Finally he nods slightly, acknowledging the truth of House's words. He wants to speak, wants to say a million things (starting with _promise me you won't leave_), but he knows he can't. Knows House can't make that promise any more than Mum could have.

"It's been two hours," House says, breaking the silence. "Still nothing."

This is familiar, the 'give me information' tone, but he doesn't have a handful of test results to go on. "It should last up to three. Beyond that…" He shrugs. "I don't know much more than you do. Your leg was less draining than Mum's hangovers."

House frowns. "That makes no sense. The damage to my leg is worse than a hangover."

"But you didn't cause it," he says. "I think it's easier for me to work with damage that's not self-inflicted."

"But you're guessing."

"Between little training, less experience, and being half-and-half, I don't really have a choice. Even Mum wasn't sure which developmental pattern I was supposed to be following."

"Which was her own fault for complicating the genetic crapshoot," House says dryly. "Although you have to admire that kind of gall—most expectant mothers assume they'll expose the fetus to teratogens if they so much as breathe wrong, and yours had no problem magically recoding a couple of genes."

Wilson gives him a disapproving look. "I'm sure she knew what she was doing."

"Not likely," Kylie says. "Not without a recorded precedent. And witches have long, long memories."

"How long?" Wilson asks.

"They can live a thousand years," he says. "And maybe that was part of why it was all right to take the kind of chance she did with me: eighty or ninety years would hardly have amounted to anything. She'd probably hoped it would extend my lifespan."

"How old was she?"

"In her two-hundred fifties, I think," he says, meeting House's gaze. "Young adulthood."

"No other children?"

He shakes his head. "Not that she told me, and she would have if there'd been any. I know I have a grandmother, at least the one aunt and probably cousins, but…"

There's that look again, unfamiliar sympathy. "But they don't want anything to do with you. Daddy Dearest's fault?"

He snorts. "Well, his packing me off to seminary didn't exactly endear me to them—they can't know whether I picked anything up there or not—but no. Odds are they blame me for Mum's death, which is—"

"Wrong," Wilson breaks in. "Blaming you is a petty solution. They can blame your father, the alcohol, her own pain—you didn't cause any of it. And your mother's family—"

"I can't be upset at them, really," he says, surprised to find he means it. "Witch clans aren't like human families—there're different standards of morality, love, forgiveness." He shrugs, and Kylie says for them, "Even if they'd have us, we're too human to fit in there."

"And enough of a witch that you have to keep your head down to fit here," House says sardonically. "Lucky for you: at least you can pass."

"Learnt that in seminary more than anything," he says, threading his fingers through Kylie's fur. Even all these years later, he doesn't like to think of it—sermon after sermon about the love of God the Father, and the hellish fates awaiting those who refused his grace.

It had been darkly amusing that no one else seemed to spot the logical fallacy of a loving God consigning most of the world to perpetual torment.

"And you wound up in seminary because…?" House asks.

"Because I lost control," he says. "I forgot what I was, what I could do; I'd just—I couldn't listen to Dad's lies for one more second. Especially not during Mum's funeral…"

**From Death she Casts Her Spell**

_He's eighteen years old, and his mother is dead._

_His mother is dead, and he's numb. He can't feel this, doesn't dare, because if he starts crying he will never, never stop._

_He'll never see her smile again or hear her laugh; they'll never have another magic lesson. There's no hope anymore that someday, somehow she'll get well and be the strong, fierce woman who let him hear the music in the stars._

_He clutches Kylie to his heart, doesn't care that she's heavy or getting dusty paw-prints on his stupid suit because this funeral isn't what Mum would've wanted anyway; this is just his father putting on a show for all the people at his bloody precious job._

"_Devoted wife, loving mother, pillar of the community," phrase after phrase that doesn't _mean _anything—what did this priest know about his mother? Not a damn thing—and nor did his father._

_And the final insult: the funeral program, the obituary, the priest all call her 'Anne,' the way his father did; and he'd bet just about anything that false, demeaning name is going on the gravestone, too._

_Everybody sits there dutifully mourning a pretty picture of a woman who never existed, and it makes him want to scream because none of it is about _his mother_, who deserves so much more respect than this. Let Rowan have a service as shallow as he is, but for his mother—_

_At least her clan knows and will observe the proper rites. They're not here in totality, of course, but he knows better than to think that the birds he saw circling overhead on the way here—owls, ravens, falcons, more species than he can name—are actually birds._

_It's a good thing people have a tendency not to look up, and that the dæmons aren't flocked together but taking the ritual in shifts._

_His father finishes the eulogy and walks down the aisle to the end of the pew he's sitting in. "Robert? Would you like to say something?"_

_There's nothing he wants to say that he _can_ say, so he bites his tongue to stop himself from telling Rowan to go to hell (there's a place for blasphemy and this definitely isn't it) and shakes his head. He's had enough._

_Rowan steps aside to let Kylie past him, but when Robert tries to follow there's suddenly a solicitous hand on his shoulder, grasping arms—he wrenches himself free and wheels to face his father. "Don't. You. _Dare. _ Touch. Me," and Kylie underscores the steel-edged words with a snarl. From her place in his pocket, Rowan's rat dæmon squeaks, apparently surprised._

"_Robert, it's perfectly understandable that you're upset—"_

"_Upset!" That's the best he can come up with? 'Upset?' He laughs, and it's a hard, bitter sound, the laugh of Artemis about to avenge herself on Niobe._

_He's forgotten his power, forgotten the peril, forgotten everything but the knowledge that this man is responsible for his pain. This man ground his mother's soul into the dust and he _will _have justice._

"Don't _tell me how I feel." His voice is controlled but he's breathing hard, nearly shaking with rage. "You lost the right to tell me _anything_ and be listened to years ago—"_

"_Robert—"_

_He will not be interrupted. "The alcohol didn't put her in that casket. _You_ did. Every time you denied her name, denied what she was and locked her up, you killed her just a little more. She tried to be what you wanted and you didn't care how much it hurt! You were never _there_; she was just a pretty toy you could keep in a box and take out when you pleased—"_

"_Now that's e—"_

"Shut up!" _ And possibly because no one tells Rowan that, because he's so completely unused to hearing it, he does. "She was too good to give you what you deserved; she could have killed you with less effort than it took to breathe, or let her sisters do it, and she wouldn't! She _protected _you, you ungrateful, ignorant—" He breaks off: there simply aren't curses foul enough._

_And in the instant's silence there is terrible grief, there is hot-bright rage; but beneath those two is Power, rocking against the cage of his control, shaking his body, howling to be let out to destroy._

_Justice._

_He doesn't have his mother's qualms._

_And she's not here to tell him 'no' anymore._

_He leans close and lowers his voice, cold certainty tempering words into a blade. "But the power you were scared of in her is still alive in me, and unlike her, I don't love you enough not to use it."_

_He abandons control, lets all his carefully cultivated barriers drop, and his power bursts gleefully free, throwing Rowan against the nearest wall of the church like a rag doll._

_For exactly three seconds he is proud, fierce, invulnerable._

_Then reality crashes down and reminds him what he's done. Where he is. How many shock-pale faces and wide eyes have taken all this in._

_What the penalty is for witchcraft._

_His father sits up, his expression a mask of absolute terror. Their eyes lock, and Rowan's lips move silently—'Andromeda,' finally; he can't deny it now—though whether it's realization or acknowledgement or curse he can't guess._

_He should be proud his father sees his mother in him._

_But all he can feel as he runs from the stone-silent church, Kylie at his heels, is heart-freezing dread._

**Crucible**

"You are _incredibly_ lucky they let you live," House says flatly. "Dramatically visible magic in the middle of a church? How they didn't slap you with a heresy charge—"

"In that one case," he says ruefully, "I owed everything to my father's political clout. He was a doctor first, but he'd made some powerful friends in the Church."

House nods. "And keeping the family line intact _would_ have been more important to him than spiritual integrity. Let me guess: he spun the whole thing so it demonized your mother and left you free to recant your sins?"

"Yeah. There was a priest at the house immediately after the funeral, and if he thought Mum regularly had Satan in for tea, I knew better than to disagree with him." He laughs humorlessly. "I must have spent two hours recanting whatever he could come up with—it would almost have been funny, except I expected him to sentence me to death at any moment."

"And when he was satisfied, you were shipped off to seminary as extra insurance?" House asks.

"It wasn't the priest's idea," he says. "Church law was satisfied after a few hundred repetitions of '_abiuro_'17; Dad just wanted me out of the house so I wouldn't kill him. Seminary training was a convenient excuse."

Minerva snarls—he's heard it before, but never as an expression of indignation on his behalf. "Right," House sneers. "Because of course the church was the safest place to put a child who could magically blow things up, what with all those supportive, _understanding_ people." He meets Chase's gaze. "No wonder I can't provoke you. A couple of years surrounded by homicidal zealots…"

"There, the 'emotional choke collar' comparison fit," he says with a nod. "It was either train myself not to react too strongly to anything, or be in constant fear for my life."

"But you were there for several years…" Wilson says.

He nods. "I didn't really have any place else to go or any plans for my life, and as long as I could play the part, it didn't matter whether I believed what they told us at Mass. I tried to lean towards the Marian devotions a bit; she was the closest to a goddess I was going to find in there and I wanted something familiar; but I didn't dare do anything more subversive than that."

There had been a certain satisfaction, though, in chanting the _Salve Regina__18_ and knowing the Mother he was praying to wasn't the one the priest had in mind.

"So what changed?" House asks. "The 'head down, mouth shut' mentality would've been hard to shake."

He cards his fingers through Kylie's fur as he thinks, tries to find some way to put this that won't set off the PTSD House must have. "They—started the cutting. And they made everyone watch a demonstration."

Minerva utters a series of raspy chirps and presses herself closer to House, as though she wants to burrow into his chest. House's face is impassive, but it's lost all color and there's something wild in his eyes that Chase doesn't want to understand.

"That was the closest I came to losing control in that place," he says quietly. "The only reason I didn't was I was too busy being sick to be angry. And the things they _said_…"

"That it was for the person's own good," House breaks in, voice dead flat. "That it was 'just a little cut', better than he des—"

"Don't!" He reaches out without thinking, clasps House's shoulder because surely any anchor at all is preferable to that nightmare. Wilson takes House's hand and holds it tightly, his thumb stroking the knuckles.

"I'm sorry," Chase says. "I didn't mean—"

House's gaze refocuses. "Wasn't your fault," he says after a moment. "You weren't trying to set me off, and anyway, it's not like it takes that much."

He isn't shrugging Chase's hand off, but it's not his place to touch House at this point. Chase lets go. "Any rate," he says, deciding to go on as though the flashback hadn't happened, "that was the end of that. It was one thing when they were just going on about salvation and all the rest of it, but when they started with… I couldn't be even a passive part of an institution that thought that was all right." A shrug. "I knew Dad had wanted me to be a doctor, and he'd fix it so I could be—he was always good at getting what he wanted. I called him the next day, and the rest is on my CV."

Wilson shakes his head. "And you kept all this bottled up for—eight years? Ten? How could you have…?"

"It was healthier than death," he says wryly. "And easier, just to bury my witch half as much as possible."

"We'd never forget it," Kylie says, "but we wouldn't think about it much. We're never going to fit well anywhere, but—"

"You fit fine," Minerva interrupts. "If we didn't think you belonged where you are, we'd have fired you years ago." She cocks her head, rolls one shoulder in what's almost a shrug. "Everybody has some kind of weirdness. Oxymoronically enough, it's normal."

"Right," he says sardonically. "Normal."

"Eh. Normal for you, anyway," House says. "You're sane, you're healthy, you function." A teasing note creeps into his tone. "And you can make things explode."

He laughs despite himself, because for all that uncontrolled power's been a threat to his safety for years, of course House would think it's brilliant.

_Let's not even think about what _he'd_ do if he could blow things up,_ Kylie says, sending him an image of most of the hospital in smoking shambles and Foreman standing in the rubble, yelling through a megaphone for order while his snake dæmon hisses in rage.

It's probably a fair guess. Couple his power with a temper like House's, and he'd give the office…a week, tops.

"Do I detect a note of jealousy?" Wilson asks House.

"Maybe just a little one," House admits. "I can think of a lot of people deserving of a metaphysical kick in the ass."

"Three seconds of satisfaction weren't worth it, House," Chase says.

"Your voice says no; that reminiscent little grin you're failing to squash says yes."

"All right, so they were three _really good_ seconds, but I could have done without the hours of terror and three years in seminary afterwards."

"Point," House concedes, and looks down at his watch. "Three hours plus five minutes. And…zip."

Why is it impossible for House to process that he doesn't know everything about how his powers work? "Three hours was the most I could do when I was eighteen," he says. "Maybe it's that your case is different, maybe magical power increases with age—I don't know. But…"

He leaves the question silent. House understands.

"I'm not always going to let you," he says. "I get…the 'why' here, but I can't do that. To either one of us."

"I don't mind—"

House sighs. "You're going to make me go into it, aren't you? Bottom line, I need to control this thing, and you are not a substitute for medication." He pauses. "You can tell when the meds aren't working."

Statement of fact. He nods.

"I'll let you then, and other than that…" He falls silent, and Minerva adds, "We'll see."

_Well, it's better than 'no,' _Kylie says.

He knows better than to push: it was a small miracle for House to accept this much.

And maybe…over time…he might accept more.

_**Desideratum**_

Several months pass. In some ways nothing changes, in some ways, everything. He has a standing invitation to House's place once a week (never on a specific day, because work is unpredictable), and he eats dinner with House and Wilson and they talk, mostly about unimportant things.

Sometimes House plays the piano afterward, which is, in its own way, a revealing conversation. Once Chase came in absently humming Mum's lullaby, and House had apparently heard something he liked in the tune because he'd picked it up by ear; and Chase was used to hearing it sung but the haunting melody had been just as beautiful from House's hands—he had to have known what it was, what it meant, but never acknowledged the gift.

He's not sure precisely when House's 'mentor' role deepened to contain the word 'father,' but he doesn't question, because he'd learnt long ago how powerful names were.

And he doesn't need to know the 'when,' because the 'why' is easy: he knows how to read House's actions, the dark halves of spoken meanings, and all of it together says that House cares. Says that Chase matters, is worth something to him; and not for his power, either (if House lets Chase relieve his pain one day in seven it's unusual). Just for who he is.

"You're good for him," Wilson had said one night, when he'd arrived ten minutes ahead of House, who was taking advantage of a pain-free leg to run home. (A bit of a risk, but Chase knows he's careful to stay out of areas where he'd be recognized as a man who's meant to be crippled.) "Not just what you do for his leg—it's a rare person who can get his walls down."

"I wasn't trying."

"I think that's why you managed. That, and he can trust you because he sees himself in you."

That had been a gem among praises—a similar pleasure should have been elicited by, 'You're so much like your father,' but it wasn't lessened any for being deferred.

It's quiet in Diagnostics today, one of those long, aimless afternoons between the frenzy of the cases, and House has been restless, switching diversionary activities almost as quickly as he begins them: PSP, Rubik's cube, tossing that oversized ball from hand to hand.

Between that and the grimace he's only partially successful in hiding, Chase doesn't need witch-sight to recognize breakthrough pain (although it's on anyway; he's never been sure whether it responds to concentration, concern or both).

Kylie whines low in her throat, a short, inquiring note, and Minerva answers with a chirp he's learnt indicates the affirmative. It's another moment before House moves to sit down at the table, though, so he guesses Minerva consented for them without asking first and a few sharp words were needed to make him cooperate.

He sits down, too, closing his eyes and regulating his breathing—it's not really a risk to do this in the office, because it's nothing visible to human eyes; and anyway the entirety of the staff (Wilson of course excepted) knows better than to approach Diagnostics uninvited: House likes his solitude, and his wrath is loud and terrible and generally humiliating to the target.

_Down, down, down, down, _Kylie murmurs into their mind. _Centered and steady I stand._

He's practiced grounding and centering daily since the first time he eased House's pain, getting back into the habit, and to his surprise it was easy after the first few times, taking only two or three minutes instead of five or ten. Part of it is that he'd learnt this too young to forget it, and the rest…

Intensive care, he'd realized, requires the same calm concentration as magic. It had just been a matter of reviewing how to tap into the energy made accessible through that concentration.

It's flowing through him now, electric warmth, and he reaches to suspend his hands over House's thigh, directing the energy down, soothing and silencing damaged nerves.

House sighs softly, and Chase can hear him settling back into his chair, uncoiling. The pain must have been terrible, if he's audibly relieved; it's a sharp contrast to the stoicism that usually accompanies this process.

Four painless hours, and then…

Right back where he'd started. Chase suppresses a sigh of his own, because it's all he can do; he hasn't learnt enough, isn't strong enough to really heal. All he can do is dispense a safe analgesic and hope that the stress he's sparing House's liver, however small, will add up to a few extra years.

If only he could—

Wait.

Seven years old, practicing healing on the wilting foxgloves—he'd begun without direction because it'd been so easy, taking energy from within himself and moving it to his hands and then the plant… Mum had stopped him almost at once, but not before the flowers had perked up again. He remembers her hands around his, her voice uncharacteristically stern: "You mustn't _ever_ do that, Robert. I know it's less difficult and I know it's stronger, but it's _dangerous_. Giving up too much of your own energy could make you seriously ill or even kill you."

It hadn't taken much to revive a plant; just enough to make him a bit dizzy for a moment. House's injury is significantly worse, and he hasn't attempted sacrificial magic since that unintentional, aborted attempt in childhood.

But it had been so simple then, and if anything he's stronger now.

And it won't kill him unless he really screws up—mortal wounds demand a life for a life, but that's not the case here. If he's careful, it shouldn't take more of his energy to heal the nerve damage than bearing it takes from House on a daily basis.

And to be able to stop the pain—really _stop_ it, so he'll never have to watch House take another of those toxic pills… Surely that's worth the chance, and anyway it's not a terrible one. If he passes out or is tired and weak for a few days, what does it matter?

_All right,_ Kylie agrees. _He'll call us an idiot, but it'll be worth it. Just—for Goddess' sake, be careful!_

He opens his eyes and looks down at his hands, still wreathed in blue-green, and the shadow of House's pain, faded now from black to gray. Waiting.

It won't have the chance to come back. House has been tortured enough, lost enough of his life; and Chase won't watch his father die the way he did his mother.

He draws a deep breath, presses his hands down on House's thigh—too intimate, not allowed, but this is a special case and it'll be easier if they're touching. He breaks the connection with the earth's energy and reaches for his own, feels it warm his hands until they're surrounded by coronas of gold. Then he directs that flow downward, closing his eyes again as it touches now-quiet nerves, regenerates them.

His head is spinning but he steels himself, continues until he senses it's finished, neurons safely whole, and lets his hands drop—Kylie's speaking but he can't arrange the syllables into anything cogent; her voice blurs into Mum's, lullaby-notes but not the words he knows by heart; something arcane that's at once blessing and protection and peace—

He falls headlong into welcoming darkness.

**Waking**

_Robert? Robert, wake up, dammit!_ Kylie's voice penetrates the fog around his brain, pulls him back to himself. He's tired and has a headache and what feels like tree bark is digging into his back, but besides that…

_How long was I out?_

_About half an hour: ten more minutes and you were getting a dose of epinephrine. _She doesn't pause to let him answer. _Come on; up you get. Time and House wait for no one._

He groans softly and opens his eyes, confirming that yes, at some point while unconscious he was taken outside, apparently by wheelchair: Kylie must have done what he wasn't awake to do and drawn energy up to replace some of what they lost.

He can still see House's aura, but now it's whole and perfect, no ugly stain marring autumn-colored brilliance.

"Leg's fine," House says shortly. "Switch the witch-sight off and focus."

For a moment he wonders how House knows it's on, but then he realizes he's looking at the space around House, rather than at his face. He forces his gaze away from the light and makes eye contact. "I'd rather not," he says, because as depleted as he feels there's no way he can turn it off. "I only have so much control over it at my best, and this isn't it."

"Right." House takes out his penlight, and Chase realizes he'd better stop him here, because what starts with a vitals check will probably progress to a CBC and chem panel and end with an MRI, and he's too tired to humor House's curiosity right now. He shakes his head, raises a staying hand.

"There's nothing wrong that some food and twelve hours of sleep won't fix. I'm physically fine."

"How about metaphysically?" House asks, getting right to the heart of the matter.

"I'll live," he says dryly. "No permanent damage."

"Okay." House pockets the penlight. "However, you did try to play with something dangerous out of Mommy's toy box, screwed up and knocked yourself out."

He chuckles despite himself, because it's rare for House to be even half-wrong. "I didn't screw up."

House's eyes narrow. "You were unconscious. That doesn't usually happen; therefore I call it screwing up."

"I wasn't doing what I usually do," he says.

A flicker of suspicion. "Then what _were_ you doing?" House demands.

"Healing," he says simply. "I managed it; the pain won't come back."

Minerva straightens up, her gaze locking on his. House's face is deliberately impassive, but of course Minerva's reaction is the truer one; betrays the hope House is trying to hide.

_Just once, can't you believe in something?_ But of course it can't be so easy for House to trust this, especially not after the disaster of the ketamine (and he has to cut the thought off there, because thinking of that means thinking of what came before it, of gunshots and House bleeding to death under his hands).

"You don't heal," House says quietly. "You can't."

"I can."

There's no answering 'You can't,' no degeneration into that old child's game: House realizes, at least, that he isn't playing. "But only by rendering yourself unconscious?"

"I can't do it properly," Chase amends, sobering a little. Kylie nudges his hand, and he threads his fingers through the thick ruff of fur at her neck. "I don't have the ability or the training. But—"

"Why're you so confident it's going to stick, then?"

He's silent for a moment, then decides an explicit explanation is best. "When I was relieving your pain," he says, "I was drawing energy from an outside source"—he gestures to indicate the earth, the trees—"and using it to shut off the pain signals. That energy is limitless; but it's also more difficult to work with. It takes a lot more effort and experience to accomplish anything lasting."

"And since you're lacking in the experience department," House surmises, "you decided to take a risky shortcut."

"More or less," he admits, and watches realization flash onto House's face like a bolt of lightning and the red in his aura flare with his temper.

_Detonation in three…two…_

"You _idiot_!" House explodes, and Minerva's snarl could rival one of Kylie's. "You do _not_ get to do with your _life_ the same thing you do with some dirt or a tree or a rock!"

He knows better than to argue and feed House's fury. "I won't need to do it again."

House is silent, absently stroking Minerva's back; red currents settle as he fights anger down. "Why?" His voice is rough, like it's difficult not to raise it and shout. "An experiment? A chance to prove to yourself that you could?"

Does House really think that's why he's doing this? Using him as some kind of guinea pig for magic practice, or to feed his own ego?

It's a hurtful assumption, or it would be if he didn't know House as well as he does: to him, any kind of altruism is suspect. And anyway, he doesn't know magic, hasn't grown up with the same rules.

"No," he says, and he's distantly surprised by the hard edge in his own voice. All right, so perhaps he _is_ a little hurt. "Even if I were insane enough to pay in life-force for an experiment, it doesn't work that way. The minute you start dealing with anything sacrificial, if it's not—you have to _mean_ it. If you don't, if you're trying to use it in a way you shouldn't…" Attempting to pervert magic that deep…

Unthinkable. _Suicidal._

"Intentions are everything, especially when the wrong ones can kill you?"

"Yeah."

"Which brings me back to my original question: _why_?" House presses. "Why decide to do something that _stupid_?"

Because you matter enough to be worth it," Kylie says quietly. "And it wasn't stupid. It's not stupid to care."

"It is when you care _that much_!" Minerva retorts. She climbs off House's lap, moves a couple of steps closer to Kylie. "It's bad enough when it's Wilson, but from you—we've given you practically nothing; we work with you and yell at you on occasion and sign your paycheck—"

"If you really think that's all you've given us," Kylie breaks in, "then you're the idiot," because of course it's been so much more than that. In Chase's heart he's teacher, friend and father all at once; and the gift of a family, even if he didn't intend to give it, was more than enough to reconcile the price paid today.

Kylie reaches to lay a paw on Minerva's and Chase takes in respect, fondness, the beginnings of trust; watches House process exactly what his motives were, realization mixed with conflict.

Their dæmons' contact breaks, and House gathers Minerva back into his arms. "Go home," he says gruffly, rising, "and get some sleep. You're no good to me if you pass out again in the middle of a differential."

He nods, half-smiling as he stands himself, because he can recognize concern and thanks when he hears it. He's still for a moment, making sure he's all right on his feet before moving to grasp the handgrips on the wheelchair and pushing it ahead of him, following House back to the hospital.

_As soon as we get home,_ Kylie says from behind him, _you're going to eat something, and then we're going to take orders and sleep._

_I know._ That's necessary if he wants to be in any state to work tomorrow.

When they pass a rubbish bin, House pauses, then takes the amber bottle of Vicodin from his pocket and tosses it in. It's a gesture more than anything, he knows—House is in the habit of hoarding medication—but it's one that says 'I trust you.'

It takes a lot for House to trust, or even to _want_ to trust.

"You okay to drive?" House asks once he's retrieved his bag and coat from the office. "If not, I can make Wilson do it."

"I'm fine," he says.

"You're exhausted."

"Not _that_ exhausted. And even if I were, Kylie could—keep me awake," he finishes, speaking to an empty room because House is already out the balcony door and en route to Wilson's office.

_Why ask when he's already made up his mind on the answer?_

_He's House, _Kylie says. _He's convinced he knows best—and meddling is his way of showing love, so let's shut up and accept it. You're too tired to argue, anyway._

He really doesn't want Wilson's work interrupted on his behalf, but she has a point—and it isn't like House ever allows his partner much uninterrupted time at a stretch.

Several minutes later, Wilson enters Diagnostics with Rona alongside and House and Minerva tagging along behind. "Well," he says after a moment, "nothing seems to be seriously wrong, so I'm going on the assumption it's worse than you think and better than House says it is."

"That's fine," he says. Then, apologetically, "I'm sorry if this interrupted—"

"Don't worry about it," House says. "No one actually reads that paperwork anyway. I spotted some shredded on Foreman's desk under his dæmon's sunlamp."

"Yes, and it was yours," Chase says. "Which is why _I_ had to sit through a ten-minute lecture on filing your paperwork immediately after filling it out and listen to Foreman rant about your insubordination."

_He's more arrogant than House and less than a tenth as competent, _Kylie says. _We can try listening to him when he does something to earn that ego, but 'til then…_

"Paperwork is pointless," House says derisively. "Maybe it's a good punishment for killing your patient, but there's no reason to do it if he lives." He turns to Wilson. "Go take him home. I leave the mother-hen bit to your discretion, and if he starts showing any occult symptoms—"

"Berate him soundly for lying about his health and page you immediately; yes, I know," Wilson says dryly. "In that order, or did you want to be paged first?"

"We're _fine_," Kylie says, but it's a vain hope that House will listen to those words, even from her mouth.

"Then you can be fine while you take the afternoon off," House says. "God. Watch it, or people will start to think you actually like this job. My reputation would be ruined and I'd have to beat off wannabe fellows with a stick." He brandishes his cane, using it to point at the door. "Now begone!"

He knows how to pick his battles, and this isn't one that needs fighting.

Besides, a meal, a dose of ibuprofen for his headache and a warm bed are sounding better by the second. He leads the way out to his car and gets into the front passenger seat, holding Kylie in his lap so Rona has room to sprawl out in the back.

"How exactly _did_ you knock yourself out?"

So House hasn't told him. "I tried something stronger on his leg," he says, deciding that if House hadn't been forthcoming with the news, it's not his to tell. "It worked, but it took a lot out of me in the process."

House would break in at this point with a scathing remark about lying by omission, but House isn't here and Wilson will have realized he's not in the mood to be badgered—not when he's visibly tired and was recently unconscious.

"And House's raving about idiocy and risk-taking?"

"Largely hyperbolic," Kylie says. "We were in control of what we did, and as we've already told House, there's no serious damage."

"But it was easier to go along than fight with him?" Rona says knowingly.

"Nearly always is," Chase says. "And it would've been masochistic to stay and subject myself to his more intense manifestations of concern. I was half-surprised not to wake up in the MRI."

"You would have, if he'd thought he could find magical damage with medical testing," Wilson says wryly. "As it is, I had to talk him out of a PCR19 test and an fMRI20 after the first time you eased his pain three months back."

"And you actually managed?" Kylie says in surprise.

Wilson nods. "Pointed out the safety risks to both of you. He might not have cared before, but now…" He sighs. "If the PTSD doesn't start to subside soon, it's going to qualify as chronic."

"If I could work a justice spell for him, I'd cast it," Chase says, thinking how often over the last months House has come to work visibly exhausted from nightmares.

"Justice spell?"

"Petitioning a deity to exact justice for wrongdoing against you or a loved one," he explains. "Objective justice, so everyone involved gets exactly what's deserved. Mum told me once that if two clans couldn't settle a dispute, it was sort of a final measure."

"That difficult to do?"

"That drastic a result," he says. "Magic that powerful—it's not like shooting an arrow into a target; it's like throwing a stone into a pond."

"Ripple effect?" Wilson surmises.

"Yeah," he says. "Starts in one place and moves outward, and you can't always anticipate the effects, never mind control them." It'd be like setting an evil-seeking missile off in the Magisterium.

A pity he can't, really.

Wilson stops in front of his apartment and parks, then gets out of the car and pulls out his cell phone. Chase pauses halfway to the door.

"What are you doing?"

"Calling House to come pick me up," Wilson says with a grin.

"You can take my car—"

"And deprive myself of the opportunity to interrupt House's goofing off? Perish the thought!" He clasps Chase's shoulder. "Go in and get some sleep. It's a six-minute drive, and if House wants those pancakes he loves for breakfast tomorrow, he won't stall."

_You heard the man, _Kylie says. She moves to the limit of their bond and takes one step past it, just enough to produce an insistent twinge. _ Food, ibuprofen, sleep. Now._

He knows that edge in her tone means she'll pull if he doesn't move, so he thanks Wilson for driving him home and follows her in. It only takes a few minutes to heat and consume a frozen entrée, and the food revives him enough that he decides he doesn't need the ibuprofen.

Changing from his work clothes into pajamas, he gets into bed and arranges his body around Kylie's, one arm slung over her and his fingers curling into the warmth of her fur.

They're asleep within moments.

**In the Dreaming**

_He's in his childhood bedroom, colorful picture books crammed into the shelves and a miniature desk strewn with paper, crayons; clumsy, scrawled attempts at handwriting ('Robertkylie', joined into one because it made sense that since they were one person they should have one name; he remembers priding himself on having asked Mum for the grown-up spellings). There are a couple of toy cars on the floor, a half-deflated beach ball limp by the closet door; picture frames on the dresser holding family photos._

This isn't how we left this room, _Kylie says._ It's how it looked when we were…what, five?

I think so. _ But although the room's not the same, they are; Kylie's still the shape she's been since they were fifteen, and a glance at the mirror over the dresser confirms that he hasn't changed, either._ We're dreaming. We can't possibly be here.

_Looking out the window, he can see the expansive backyard, the jungle gym with its slide and swing and climbing-frame; endless blue sky and Mum's garden in bloom, bright yellow cassias, jonquils, fragrant lemon verbena…_

_And Mum in the garden among the flowers, her hair shining gold in the sun and Zeru wheeling overhead._

"Mum." _It's barely more than a breath, lips silently forming the shape of the word; he's afraid that if he dares speak, dares move, the spell will break and she'll vanish—_

_But then Kylie's moving, running, and he has to run after her unless he wants to be pulled by the heart but he's glad (out of the bedroom, down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door with a bang, haste-clumsy fingers fumbling with the key), because otherwise he might have stood there too long and he's not sure how long this will last—_

"_Mum!" Kylie's voice, not his, but it doesn't matter—she straightens up and turns to face them, her face lighting with her smile; and Zeru's circling down toward Kylie and he's in his mother's arms, holding and being held tight, and she smells like fresh air and sunlight and home, none of the astringency of alcohol; everything is just as it should be, and in that moment the years fall away and he's a little boy in the perfect love and safety of her embrace._

_And then she lets him go, draws back just a little, her gaze taking him in as Zeru flies from his place beside Kylie and lands on her shoulder. "You've grown up so well, Robert," she says softly, "and I couldn't be more proud."_

_He's not sure whether to accept her approval or protest, because surely he hasn't done anything all that great—he's still ashamed of the passive years in seminary and it's only since he started to work with House that he's felt worthwhile… "But I—"_

"_Have I ever given you empty praise?"_

_He shakes his head._

"_Then believe me: there is a very great deal in you to be proud of." She pauses, and her smile turns playful. "And if you don't believe me, House is also proud of you, and he's significantly more difficult to impress."_

"_Don't we know it," Kylie mutters._

"_Hang on," he says, because there's no way she could have known about that unless… "You've been—looking after me all this time?"_

"_Don't tell me you thought I wouldn't," she says. "I promised I'd never leave you, remember?"_

"_It didn't end up meaning what I hoped it meant," he says quietly. Then, meeting her gaze, "But if you really have—then why am I only seeing you now?"_

"_You were never going to be able to see me as long as you were shutting half yourself away," she says. "'If that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.'"_

_Part of the full moon ritual. He hasn't observed an esbat since she died, but he remembers the words and adds, a little wryly, "'For behold, I have been with you since the beginning.'"__21__ He pauses. "I wasn't trying to shut you out, or any of it—it was just that—"_

"_There wasn't a choice," she says with a nod. "I know. You were as true to yourself as you could be and still be safe. You did the right thing."_

"_But after getting how much wrong? I shouldn't have—if I'd just—"_

"_Oh, Robert." She shakes her head, takes his hands. "You need to let the 'what-ifs' go. The past is the past, and you're who and what and where you are. It has to be enough."_

"_We know wondering doesn't change anything," Kylie says. "It's just—we miss you so much, and we can't help asking—"_

"_What if you'd been able to convince us to go when you were ten," Zeru says matter-of-factly. "What if you'd been born a full witch and we'd left Rowan and raised you the way daughters are. What if you'd been able to stop us drinking ourself to death."_

_He nods, wondering absently how long she's watched him turn those questions over and over, striving for some resolution like Sisyphus struggling with his stone; and she smiles slightly, sadly._

"_One last lesson, then," she says. "Perhaps showing you the truth of those alternative worlds will give you peace."_

"_Alternative…worlds?"_

"_We know only one life, one fate; but there are uncountable ones we never touch," she explains. "Every choice takes us down one path, but other paths branch off in a billion directions." She releases one of his hands and gestures, and all at once the familiar garden dissolves into a tapestry in three dimensions, infinite numbers of gold and silver lines that cross and run parallel, bifurcate and coil in every direction farther than he can see and it's all—there's a pattern, he knows, but he could stand here for millennia and never understand it. It's the Design, the Plan, the Is and Was and Will Be and Could Have Been for all the world at once; and just looking at it is mind-boggling._

_Mum reaches to touch one of the lines, murmurs something that makes it reverberate like a guitar-string, and all at once they're in his bedroom, and—_

_He recognizes himself, ten years old, and Kylie in her cat form, tucked into bed; and there's Mum in her witch's dress, bow and arrows and cloud-pine, only this never happened—she never came back in after Dad yelled at her that night—_

"_You're going to go, then?" younger-Chase asks softly, and he sounds pleased and heartbroken at once. Other-Mum nods and gathers him into her arms, and Zeru begins to preen Kylie's fur._

"_For a little while, anyway," other-Mum says. "Maybe spending half the year with my sisters and half with you would…" She kisses him, then breaks off a spray from the cloud-pine and presses it into his hands. "If you need me, hold that and call, and I'll come," she says. "And I'll be back by winter solstice."_

_And then she goes, and that's when everything starts to go horribly wrong. Just as House had predicted, it's mere days after the binding spell wears off when he loses his temper with his father, resulting in a rather impressive explosion of dishware, and before long he's been shipped off to the church with a rucksack full of clothes and a copy of the Bible and nothing else, no lifeline to his mother to call out with._

_There are a few days spent with priests and twisting circles of questions, and Chase, watching, fears for his younger self because Mum had taught him to agree with whatever the church said in case of emergency, but not the kind of verbal artistry needed to escape intense inquisition unscathed; he couldn't have been expected to learn that so young—and they do their best to provoke him, watch stained-glass windows explode into razor shards and murmur to themselves about witchcraft and corruption. Finally, they stop the questions and send him to bed._

_Alarm bells have to be going off in his younger self's head, too, but after a few hours have gone by without incident he sleeps, Kylie curled up in her cat form against his side._

_A priest enters the darkened room with a steel-and-mesh animal carrier, flanked by several stone-faced nuns, and Chase knows what's about to happen, feels atavistic terror constrict around his heart—he wants to look away but he can't, he's stuck there watching—he kneels and clutches Kylie hard to his chest, and in a moment her whimpering is drowned out by the yowl of younger-Chase's Kylie as she's _picked up _by the priest and stuffed into the carrier and it's locked and she can't get out—_

_Younger-Chase is awake now, pale and trembling and wide-eyed with shock, seems to be struggling to breathe—the nuns restrain him, pin down flailing arms and legs and Chase's witch-sight flares; he hears the boy's screaming and the dæmon's, sees their bond stretch beyond endurance and rend apart in a bright flash like hellfire, and he muffles a hoarse cry in Kylie's neck._

It didn't happen to us, _she says shakily. _ We're one, we're safe—

_All at once the boy stops fighting; he falls limp like a marionette with cut strings, and the nuns carry him to an infirmary, give him a sedative 'for the shock,' but it doesn't do any good: younger-Chase dies hours later, holding a pillow to his heart with a white-knuckled grip._

_And then the scene changes and he sees his mother somewhere he doesn't recognize; she's flying with her sisters when all at once her face twists in pain. He sees her lips form the shape of his name, and then she's flying away from the others, circling downward, landing; he watches as Zeru joins her, and now he can hear her speak—_

"_Persephone Praxidice, exacter of justice…judge me as I deserve for the selfishness of abandoning my child." And then she's taking a knife from a sheath at her belt and—Goddess, no!—plunging it into her heart with a cry and a gasp and a bright spray of blood, and in a moment she falls lifeless to the ground, Zeru's form dissipating like smoke._

_This isn't what happened. But although she's not the mother he knows, the sheer horror of what she did…_

_Invoking the Iron Queen's justice would have condemned her even beyond death._

_Suddenly they're back in the place between, nightmare-visions replaced by the peace of blue-black space and bright lines. He doesn't let Kylie go—can't—but after a moment he feels Mum's hand at his back, circles of reassuring pressure. "You would have—?"_

"_I couldn't have lived with myself, knowing I'd left you and that had happened because I wasn't there," she says softly, "and I'd hardly have been the first witch to kill herself in grief for the loss of a son. But see? My leaving wouldn't have made things better for either of us."_

_And he _does _see, and despite the horror there's a kind of peace in finally knowing her choice had been the right one. She had moments of happiness for several years after that night, and because she stayed he's alive, whole._

_Finally he releases Kylie, looks down at the gold-silver-brown cord connecting their hearts and rises, turns to face his mother. There's more silver now in her aura than there ever was when she was alive, and the whole thing is so bright it nearly hurts to look at. He blinks several times, wills it away, and for once his sight obeys him._

"_Are you ready to see the next one?"_

_He almost wants to leave well enough alone, because he's seen enough to know none of these alternate lives are likely to be the perfection he'd hoped, but…_

_But he knows, too, that it's not healthy to keep asking 'what-if', and that this is the only way he'll ever be able to stop. He nods, and she strums another cord: suddenly they're in a hospital room, and other-Mum is lying in the bed with Zeru perched on the rail. Her face is flushed and her hair sweat-damp, and she's cradling a pink-wrapped bundle in her arms, watching the glints of shifting gold light shining through the fabric—the baby's as-yet-formless dæmon._

_He moves closer, looks into the tiny red, squashed face of this other-self he might have been; at downy blonde hair and slightly crossed blue eyes—and then he looks up, because Rowan (or a version of him, anyway) has just burst through the door. He savors the outrage on the man's face, and the Andromeda in the bed is watching with amusement._

"_You said you could predict the sex of the baby!"_

"_And I did, Rowan. Then I lied to you about it." She smiles the smile of the cat who's just gotten the cream and eaten several canaries. "I had the idea you wouldn't appreciate having a daughter, you see."_

_Other-Rowan's lips move soundlessly; his shocked eyes are fixed on his daughter, as though he can't quite believe what's happened; that it's unthinkable he hasn't gotten what he expected._

Serves him right, _Kylie says, and Chase grins. He's really,_ really_ enjoying this._

"_And as soon as I'm feeling up to it, I will be leaving and taking my daughter with me to raise"—there's a subtle, laying-down-the-law emphasis on 'my'—"alongside my sisters and their daughters."_

_Rowan couldn't have looked more shocked if she'd slapped him in the face. "But—but—"_

"_I came to realize shortly after our marriage that you were using me," other-Mum says cheerfully, "and that my sisters were absolutely right: we need men to breed; it doesn't mean we have to live with them." Then, magnanimously, "You're welcome to explain my absence and hers to your colleagues and clergy however you like."_

_This is how his mother should have dealt with his father from the beginning._

"_Don't be ridiculous, Anne!" Rowan says. He's straightening up, squaring his shoulders, trying to regain control of the situation. "She's as much my daughter as—"_

"_Have you forgotten what she is?" other-Mum breaks in. "If you can honestly say you don't mind, that you'll let me raise her as a young witch should be raised, then we can make a go of it. Otherwise—"_

_Rowan storms out._

_Chase laughs—because he _would_ do that, of course—then turns to his mother. "Why didn't you…?"_

"_Insist on being who and what I was from the beginning?" She sighs. "Love isn't rational, Robert. And I did love him, once. This version of me—couldn't make the choices for her daughter she did for herself, and probably thought long and hard about how Rowan would treat a daughter during her pregnancy."_

"_As property," Chase supplies, "to advance him through her marriage. Which, I guess, would have made that you think—"_

"_Of exactly how she was being treated, yes."_

_Other-Mum names her daughter Rhea, in honor of the Great Mother, and Zeru calls her dæmon Zephyr__22__._

_They're back at the house after two days in the hospital, and at nightfall Andromeda mounts her cloud-pine branch and leaves, bow and arrows at her back and her daughter in a sling wrapped around her torso. Rowan doesn't protest._

_He watches Rhea's saining__23__, blessings bestowed on her by grandmother, aunts, cousins: "I give the gift of strength…intelligence…bravery…perseverance…sound judgment…" a wealth of good wishes with Goddess and God watching over._

_Fragments of her childhood: magic lessons with Mum, where the content is sometimes the same and sometimes different and the attentive face of the little girl at once familiar and jarring (same coloring, same curious-observant gaze, but everything else too different to really see himself in). Flying, with her dæmon a bird of prey beside her; another ritual in adolescence to celebrate her menarche; and then the dæmon's keening and the girl with her hands pressed to her heart and passionate pain in her face as she walks the wastelands, utterly alone for the first time._

_He sees her as an adult, Zephyr a falcon; sees her ability as a healer and her closeness with her mother, with the clan that loves her; sees her joy and freedom and power and knows that it will continue forever._

_And it feels like he's only seeing half the picture, because although there are elements of the self he knows in this woman, she's fundamentally different; she hasn't faced his adversities, and though she's older than he is—must be older—she retains innocence he lost years ago, somehow still a child despite her settled dæmon._

"_And the hospital?" he asks Mum. "House?"_

_The scene changes, and he realizes almost at once that House of this world works alone. He pursues his puzzles with the same single-minded zeal Chase knows, but Wilson isn't always sounding-board enough and cases can be more difficult. There are a few misses, even; cases that they solved together but House doesn't quite get by himself._

He needs us more than we thought, _Kylie says. _ We make things move faster, and I think…he gets something out of the teaching that he doesn't have here.

_It's true: there's a certain animation, a pleasure in the discussion that he doesn't see with just House and Minerva firing their own ideas from voice to voice._

_Thinking of House makes him remember the recent horror; he hopes he won't have to see that because he knows he can't handle it; but as it turns out, this House is never intercised; never has the chance to piss off that fateful church official._

_He's shot by his insane ex-patient months before it would have happened._

_Wilson isn't in his office and no one else is near enough Diagnostics to hear the shots; there's no one to staunch the bleeding, call a code, keep House stable._

_Hypovolemic shock precedes death by moments. Minerva vanishes and House is an empty shell crumpled on the carpet, too-pale features frozen in a death mask and eyes fixed and dull._

_Wilson breaks down in tears at the funeral, but no one notices because Rona's grief-stricken howling drowns out his sobbing._

It's not real, _he reminds himself._ It's not real. _ In his own fate-line, House is alive and healthy; Wilson's life isn't in shambles. Because Chase was in the right place at the right time with the right training to avert the disaster._

"_You're more necessary to him than he'll ever admit," Mum says as the grim image disappears and returns them to the in-between. "Lives were saved because you sparked the right idea at the right time, or were there with a critical insight of your own. You've kept him alive to keep doing the good he does; and through you, everything he has to teach will go on after his lifetime."_

_And House knows that. All of that._

_And so should he have, but…it just wasn't something he'd thought about._

"_He'll be all right now," he says, half to himself. "With the pain gone—"_

"_About that, Robert," Mum breaks in. "I _distinctly_ remember telling you that you were never to—"_

"_We know it wasn't safe," Kylie says, "and we won't do it again, but…he was worth the risk. We couldn't lose him the way we'd lost you; not when we had the power to do something."_

_She nods. "He's important to you, I know." Her smile turns approving, and she adds, "You chose your father well: he'll fight for you, too, if he ever has to."_

"_But our first concern is always going to be for you," Zeru says. "And we don't want to see you taking any more chances."_

"_We won't have to," Kylie says. It's a statement, not a promise; he knows that if there's ever something wrong again that medicine won't fix, he'll take the same risk—but that's not likely. Hospital security has been better ever since the shooting (Foreman's preoccupation with liability and covering his own arse for once working in their favor); and besides the leg, House has no immediately threatening health problems. The liver damage is still a concern, but less of one: without the continual assault of the Vicodin, a good deal of it will heal on its own._

_And if anything else goes wrong, House will diagnose and fix it medically long before Chase needs to get involved._

_He turns his attention back to his mother. "Mum…weren't you going to show me…?"_

_What he could have done to save her. Where he failed._

"_I can't," she says simply._

"_Why not? Both of the others—"_

"_Were possible," she breaks in. "But in every case, when I started to drink like that, it killed me no matter what you did. Because it never was anything you could change."_

_He remembers House's words about pain, matches them against Mum's; realizes the message is the same. That she's saying that in a billion, billion worlds, he was never able to do anything once she'd made up her mind to drown._

_Words won't come; it's all he can do to loosen his hold on self-blame, to admit she could be right. He moves forward, lets her hold him._

"_There's nothing you need to be sorry for, Robert. I don't blame you; I never did. If anything, _I'm_ the one who should be apologizing."_

_And there's a part of him that's angry, that wants to tell her that apologizing _post mortem_ doesn't count, but the larger part, the part that's learnt to cope with the pain of her loss, knows that's not right. "There were no good choices at that point," he says. "You did the only thing you could to make it bearable." He holds her a little more tightly, because of course this can't last forever and he wants to remember it, absorb the memory into his skin. "I can't say I really understand. But I can…forgive."_

_It's easier to say that—to_ mean _that—than he'd thought it would be._

"_Thank you," Zeru says, and Mum presses a kiss to his cheek and lets him go. "I love you."_

_He just manages to force an answering, "I love you, too," past the lump that's risen in his throat; and then _the alarm clock blares and the dream shatters.

**Family**

He throws out an arm automatically, silencing the noise; and for several moments after that he's still, neither speaking nor opening his eyes. Trying to hold on to the dream.

He remembers the broken little boy, the powerful woman and her clan, his mother's arms around him; and the memories stay there, as easily accessible as any formed in waking life; wonderful and terrible at once.

Thinking of the other-self so brutally destroyed, he shudders and holds Kylie tighter. It didn't happen. Not to them, not here.

_We're all right, _Kylie murmurs. _We're who and what and where we're supposed to be, and we know it._

He nods, because neither of those other lives had been even close to the perfection he'd hoped—well, the alternate in the second one had been happy, had had…_her_ mother safe and well, but…

_Not human enough, _Kylie says. _ If we were one or the other, there'd always be half missing._

He can't imagine himself without the formative influence of human society, human pain, any more than he can life without witch's power. His self-concept is rooted too deeply in the knowledge that he's both.

If he could spin a fate-line of his choosing, Mum would be alive; there'd be no Magisterium to fear; there'd have been no infarction to breed so much bitterness in House, no guillotine-stroke to scar him to his soul. He'd visit Mum on the weekends and House and Wilson sometime during the week, and his extended family when he's off work in the summer—

And it's a nice fantasy, but that's all. If there is a world with that makeup (and there probably is; there were certainly enough lines for every possible permutation to be played out), he knows better now than to believe it's perfect. Cause and effect: if this, then not this. If not this, then this and this and that instead, and it's impossible to anticipate how things would end up.

Just thinking about it is enough to give him a headache.

_Let's not, _Kylie says. _We have to get up, anyway—if we're not at work at eight, it doesn't take a genius to figure out where House will be at five after._

House doesn't usually show up before at least ten, but Chase is reliably present at eight, and if he deviates from routine today, House will show up at his door with a lock-pick and worst-case assumptions, and he'll end up insisting "I'm _fine_," all the way through a full battery of tests.

He chuckles to himself as he throws off the covers. House's brand of concern may have all the delicate subtlety of a sledgehammer, but it's still good to know House feels he's worth it.

It doesn't take long to dress and get ready for work, moving just a little faster than usual: better to err on the side of caution and be slightly early.

Sure enough, when he gets in at five to eight, House is already there, sitting at the conference table watching Minerva shred…last week's paperwork.

_Thank Goddess for carbon paper and Xerox machines,_ Kylie says, _or you'd have to do the whole lot over._

On the other hand, it's good to see Minerva in high spirits: a paperwork nest generally means House is in the mood to be Up to Something (not surprising, since it's been four days since they had a case) and is warming up with small subversions.

All is right with the world.

"You," House proclaims as Chase hangs up his coat and wonders whether he wants a second cup of coffee, "are visibly happy to see me."

He raises an eyebrow, glances at Kylie. Sure enough, she's watching House with a smile and her tail is wagging slightly.

"Relieved," he corrects. "Had a nightmare last night…I guess I was a little more shaken up than I thought."

Minerva looks up from the remains of a patient history, shaking herself to dislodge clinging paper scraps from her fur. "I'm guessing a horrible fate befell us?"

"It was…last spring." He gestures vaguely at the carpet, fortunately replaced by Foreman despite House's resistance. He wouldn't have been able to stand coming in to the sight of House's blood on the floor every morning.

"So my nightmares took a night off and you picked up the slack," House surmises. "Perfect."

He looks a little more closely at House: he does look like he slept better, and his cane is propped up against the table. "Keeping up appearances?"

"Obviously." House pulls an amber bottle out of his pocket and shakes it, and Chase notes a slightly different sound. "Right down to sugar pills. After all, if I can't play the cripple-in-pain card, I can't get away with half as much."

"Somehow I think you'd get by on force of personality," he says wryly. "And it isn't like—" He breaks off as his witch-sight flares, blinking rapidly several times: he's pleased to see House's aura is noticeably brighter. "Sorry. Just give me a second."

"You have almost no control over that."

He shrugs. "It goes on if I watch anyone closely enough for a while. I can try to turn it back off, but sometimes it will and sometimes it won't. Started when I was about seven, and then I spent the next year or two learning how to read it."

House's gaze intensifies and he leans forward slightly, apparently having decided that, in absence of a case, new information will do to keep him occupied. "What do you actually see when that happens?"

He pulls a pen out of his pocket and retrieves a piece of paperwork that's only half-shredded, sketching a quick outline of a human figure, indicating the space around it. "I see light, there," he says. "The colors and patterns and so on are different from person to person, but every one has a range of meanings."

"So how do you know which one applies?" Minerva asks.

"Observation," Kylie replies. "We can guess, but we don't know unless we've been around a person for a while. Still, just having a general idea is enough to know whether we should be on our guard or not."

"Or if I'm in a particularly foul mood, apparently."

"Dark red," Chase confirms, "for temper. Also for impulsivity, so when we're on a case it's always a toss-up between 'frustration' and 'about to do something reckless.' But the yellow in your aura darkens with frustration, so—"

"What's yellow for?"

The witch-sight recedes again. "In your case, intellect. It's your primary color." He half-smiles and adds, "When a case clicks in your head, you flash like a light-bulb. Gold."

"I gather from your tone that that's impressive."

"Inspiration. The highest possible fulfillment. Gold in men; silver in women. It doesn't turn up in many people."

"We're gold when we diagnose," Minerva says quietly, "like your mother was silver when she flew."

Kylie nods. "That need to know…"

"Is essential to us," Minerva says. There's a pause, then, with remembered pleasure in her tone, "I settled on that conviction. We were fourteen, and we saw that having the _right answer_ overruled everything else."

Fourteen. Even he was fifteen when Kylie settled, precocity rooted in pain; he doesn't want to think what horror there is in House's childhood that made him grow up so fast.

"We were in Japan at the time," House says. "My father was never stationed in any one place for more than a year or so, but the military brat lifestyle had its upsides."

"And its downsides," Minerva says with a wince. "We were fifteen in Egypt. Greg insisted on spending most of his time playing archeologist in the desert—do I _look_ like I'm designed for the desert?"

"Better to swelter than freeze," Kylie says.

House smirks. "I'm guessing you didn't enjoy your first winter up here."

"As usual, you guess right," Chase says, remembering the initial shock of bitter northeastern cold. "All the moving around you did, I guess you didn't get used to a single climate until university; but I'd lived in the warm all my life. Winter was fascinating for about a week…and then I started to hate it with a passion."

"Sun-worshipper."

"Not technically." God is sun as Goddess is moon, but he's never been comfortable with God. Because of course God is Father, and Rowan didn't exactly show him fathers were to be trusted.

_Maybe not all fathers,_ Kylie says. _But we can trust this one._

He _does_ trust House, because House has earned it—has pushed him and annoyed him and amazed him in turns but always _been_ _there_ with the implicit belief he'll do his best. House cares about him, for who and what he is.

And there's healing in that honest affection, slower and subtler but deeper than anything magic can accomplish.

"Didn't mean it like that," House says.

"I know."

There's a pause, then, "It wasn't just a nightmare, was it?"

He shakes his head. "Bit more complicated than that, but…"

"Not here. Right," Minerva says. "After work?"

He agrees, and House sends him down to scour the clinic for potential cases.

There's nothing there but a particularly nasty virus keeping far too many school-age children home sick, sitting in the waiting room with their dæmons lying listless in their laps. Really, one would think that at some point all these worried parents would have realized science hasn't yet devised a cure for the common cold, but no.

Unfortunately.

Twenty such diagnoses later, he can understand why House once went out and diagnosed an entire waiting room of cold-sufferers _en masse_ ("You have _colds_, you morons! Go home, take a Motrin and a nap, and quit wasting my time!" Chase had caught hell from Foreman for not stopping that, but it'd been worth it to see so many scandalized faces).

In one way it's good that no one is afflicted by an exotic, potentially fatal illness; but in another it makes the Diagnostics department rather unnecessary. One patient a week is enough to keep them busy, but any less than that and Foreman will start whining about financial vacuums, which he does about once a month or whenever House incurs a frivolous lawsuit.

"Nothing in the clinic," he hears House complaining to Wilson when he arrives at House's apartment that evening. "If the ER-intake drones don't have something tomorrow, I might have to paste some of those referral requests back together."

He knocks on the door, and House lets him in a moment later. Now he's not keeping up the pretense of pain: the cane is nowhere in sight, and his stride is even, effortless.

Chase smiles to himself and moves to sit down on the couch, Kylie pushing aside a few scattered papers and lying down near its arm. Wilson is already at the opposite end, Rona lounging at his feet and Minerva lying atop Rona. It's a good sign, he thinks as House takes his usual place in the center, that he doesn't have to maintain contact with her all the time anymore. He may never heal completely, but he'll get better.

"So," House says, "about this dream of yours—"

"Actually," Wilson breaks in, "before we discuss that, I wanted…" He pauses, sighs softly. "His pain's been gone for over a day now—when do you expect…?"

Right. Of course House wouldn't have told Wilson the pain is gone; probably wouldn't have mentioned it at all—because of course that would have meant raising Wilson's hopes, too, and his own are still too fragile. "It's not going to," Kylie says.

Rona's gaze locks on hers, and though he can't read her expressions as well as he can Minerva's, it's unmistakable how much Wilson wants to believe him. "How did you…? We thought—"

"I can't do it the way it's supposed to be done," he says. "And what I did wasn't exactly safe—"

"And I quote," Minerva breaks in, gesturing to indicate Kylie, "'life-threateningly stupid.'"

"Only if it'd gone wrong," he says, seeing Wilson's alarm, "which wasn't likely. I took a calculated risk."

"And went out like a light," House says.

He sighs. "I was unconscious for half an hour and needed a meal and some sleep. You no longer have nerve damage and won't be in pain anymore. On balance, the price I paid wasn't that high."

House looks like he wants to start ranting about the general stupidity of self-sacrifice, but Wilson breaks in.

"Have you had an MRI done?"

"No."

"You should," Wilson says. "It'd make you feel better to be sure, and I'd like to—"

"No," House repeats, and when Minerva adds a hiss for emphasis, Wilson backs down.

"All right." A pause. "Someday?"

"When I'm willing to have it, I'll let you know."

Wilson nods, but still looks disappointed.

"He doesn't need an MRI," Chase says. "I know it's—I know you can't see it, but I can. The nerves are normal; there won't be any more pain."

"Sixth sense?" Wilson asks.

He shakes his head. "No. It's Aunt Callisto who Sees; I just have a standard variation in my vision."

House looks up, intrigued. "She was just 'Callisto' before. Why the familial title now? Been visiting?"

He hadn't changed the reference on purpose; it had just been natural to call her 'aunt' after the dream, once he'd gotten to know her and some of his other family members, and who they were to his other-self. "Since yesterday?"

"Fair point; obviously you haven't taken an eighteen-hour flight—"

"Twenty-and-a-half," he corrects with a wince.

"Twenty-and-a-half-hour flight," House continues without missing a beat. "So how exactly could you dream of relatives you've never met?"

He's used to it by now, how House's mind jumps from A to D or farther with no warning to connect seemingly unrelated things—he's learning to make similar leaps himself—but it can still be a little disconcerting. "I dreamed of my mother," he says. "She…answered some questions I've had for a while, showed me how my personal what-ifs would've played out."

House watches him with interest, but no visible skepticism. "And those are?"

"If she'd have lived if I'd been able to convince her to go when I was ten. What if I'd been born a full witch and raised that way, without my father in the picture." Softly, he finishes, "What if I'd somehow been able to stop her drinking."

"You couldn't have," House says with certainty, and he nods.

"You're right. In a billion, billion possible fates…there was nothing I could do. She said as much."

"A billion fates?" Wilson asks. "Then…this isn't…?"

He shakes his head. "All the possibilities are there, the past-present-future of everything. Lines diverge and bifurcate and run parallel—there were…I guess an infinite number, in infinite space. I could've stood there for millennia and not understood the pattern."

"The ultimate puzzle," House surmises, and there's something in his tone that's half jealousy and half—the only word Chase can think of is _hunger_.

Wilson hears it, too. "Don't, House. The answer to Life, the Universe and Everything24 is beyond even you—unless you've acquired an interest in applied metaphysics?"

"Not my area," House says, shaking his head. "I'd have to revamp my entire belief system for that." He still looks a little wistful, but after a moment he shakes it off. "I'm guessing possibility one didn't play out as nicely as you'd hoped."

He remembers the screams and the flash of a breaking bond and the gleaming knife and shudders, reaching down for Kylie and burying his fingers in the warmth of her fur. "It took…a couple of hours after the binding spell wore off for something to explode. Eventually it happened in front of my father. He handed me over to the church. They killed me; Mum killed herself."

Perhaps it's the implication of what happened to his other-self, or perhaps Chase's horror shows on his face, because House grimaces. Minerva makes a soft crooning sound that—well, he doesn't know the precise meaning; he's still learning her nonverbal code, but it's probably supposed to be comforting, though whether to House or to him or both he's not sure.

"And the other life?" House asks after a moment.

"Having a daughter instead of a son made the difference," he says, smiling to himself at the memory of Rowan finally put in his place. "She told my father—everything she should have to begin with. That he was using her and she wasn't going to put up with it, and she was taking me—well, that version of me—and leaving."

"We'll cherish the memory of the look on his face for the rest of our life," Kylie adds, her tone rich with satisfaction.

"I'd have paid to see that look," House says, smirking. "He liked to control people—having the tables turned on him would've hit like a ton of bricks."

"It did," he confirms. "It was so good…to see her stop tolerating him, take her power back. Like all of a sudden it was all right to throw the mask off."

"People do that when they're burning bridges," House says. "Although it would've been one spectacular deflagration." He pauses. "And that would've been where the family connection came from: little witch's life."

"Rhea's," he says.

House raises an eyebrow. "Is it just a thing with witches, that they're all named after goddesses and stars?"

"Naming traditions vary from clan to clan. Mum's mostly used star names; a couple of goddess ones. Aunt Callisto named her daughter Aurora, for example." He thinks of his favorite cousin, whom Rhea had called sister and companion. "But Aunt Alcyone's daughter is Arista, and my grandmother is Cassiopeia."

"You didn't mention having another aunt," Wilson says.

"Didn't know about her before; she and Mum weren't that close because of the age gap. It was…I actually don't know how large, because it wasn't like any of them really showed age; but enough that they all had different fathers."

"Wide enough that one man couldn't have fathered all three," House surmises. Then, changing tacks, "So this version of you grew up with a family."

"It's…different from a human family structure. I—she—" He breaks off, unsure which to use: she _was_ him, in one way, but so fundamentally different.

"Just say 'I'," House says. "Technically true, and it'll save you the trouble of switching to third person."

"I was closest to Mum, then, but her sisters were also like mothers to me. All the girls in my age-range were my sisters. Blood connections—well, everyone knew who belonged especially to whom, but it…mattered less."

"But you were happy?"

The question comes from House, and that's surprising: House isn't the one who asks about feelings. "Yes. I was happy. But…" He pauses, drops the 'I': it's served its purpose. "It was hard to see myself in her, and…"

"And?"

"And it felt like half my life was missing. I mean, I know it wouldn't have been like that if I'd really lived it; I wouldn't have known anything else, but…" He pauses. "I wanted to see the rest of it, the human half. You, the hospital."

"I'd've been working alone," House says matter-of-factly.

"You…were, but—"

"Oh, come on. I'd be a lousy diagnostician if I couldn't even predict my _own_ actions." He's quiet for a moment, and Minerva says, "We didn't hire you to piss off your father; that was just a nice bonus. You got the job on merit, and we don't settle for second-best."

Explicit praise. From _House_.

If his witch-sight were on right now, he swears he'd be able to see himself glow orange with pride.

Still, he knows better than to acknowledge it. "There were a few cases I remember we solved that you didn't, by yourself; and Foreman was on your back more without me to do the paperwork and run interference with the patients."

House nods. "Obviously. And then the deranged gunman killed me, hence the 'nightmare' bit of the scenario."

Rona whines, and Wilson closes a hand around House's: they find the idea just as horrifying as he did.

He nods slightly, swallows hard and tries to dislodge the memory of House's lifeless body, and the more vivid one, actually lived, of his hands slick with hot blood and his heart pounding a staccato beat in his chest, his only thought _Goddess please don't let him die!_ "Yes. Since I wasn't there…"

"Also obviously. You need me where I am; I need you where you are. Works out best for all concerned."

That's probably as close as House will ever come to acknowledging it, this paternal-filial bond between them, but he doesn't need it spelled out for him. "That's what I came away with." He pauses, then says, "And Mum agrees with you that what I did for you was risky and stupid."

"Good judgment," House says.

"But she trusts you with me anyway."

"Less good judgment. I'm not good at this whole…" He gestures vaguely. "Thing."

"Good enough," Kylie says, and he sees from the flicker of pleased surprise in House's gaze that those words mean as much to House as they did to him.

There's an instant's silence; then the spell breaks. "Okay, storytime over," House says. "Wilson, what did you make with the unholy racket this morning?"

"A casserole," Wilson says. "And one of these days I'm going to get up and make _enough_ of an unholy racket that it gets you out of bed, and then I can have dinner prep done in half the time."

"Twice the time," House corrects. "If I were actually helpful, it would set all kinds of ugly precedents. Next thing I knew, you'd be roping me into doing the laundry and washing the dishes."

Chase chuckles to himself and leans back against the cushions, half-closing his eyes: their companionable bickering is, in its own way, as soothing as Mum's embraces and lullaby-song.

He is who and what and where he's meant to be, and he's not alone.

What he has now isn't the archetypal perfection he'd hoped for as a child, nor the unattainable affection of Mum's clan; it's nothing but the sum of his own choices, but…

But he has a father in House just the same, a loyal friend in Wilson. And Mum, somewhere, unseen but still watching, protecting, loving.

It's enough.

This family is enough.

**END.**

1 You will recognize 'Minerva' as the name of the Roman goddess of wisdom and war (and, as Minerva Medica, patroness of healing and doctors). Raccoons symbolize curiosity, cleverness, unique perception, dexterity and deception.

2 'Eunomia' means 'good order/governance by good laws'; the mythical Eunomia was the Greek goddess of law and legislation. Her form, the German shepherd, is a breed traditionally used in military/police work.

3 "Kylie" is an Aboriginal Australian name meaning 'boomerang'—a nod to Chase's apparent tendency to be 'thrown around' by authority figures. By my interpretation, however, what seems to be passivity is actually preference to fight only necessary battles—hence the name's tie to the Gaelic 'Kelly', 'warrior.' Dingoes are traditionally identified with the struggle between dependence and independence, the ability to decipher messages, intelligence, adaptability, and the power of speech.

4 The colors of House's aura indicate intelligence, memory, action, logic, and ambition, streaked with strength, passion, survival and force. The gold and silver strands of the bond represent the masculine and feminine energies, respectively.

5 Rona's wolf form symbolizes (among other things), guardianship/teaching, perseverance, cunning, intuition, communication, and loyalty to the family group. Her name, although it can also be Hebraic (meaning "joy"), Norse ("strength") or Gaelic ("seal"), is used with its English meaning: "counsel power" or "advisor to the king."

6 Wilson's aura colors represent "intelligence and logic mixed with healing, fertility and growth; then a mix of wisdom, protection, reassurance, creativity, grounding, friendship and influence."

7 John 15:13: "Greater love hath no man than this, that one lay down his life for his friends." (Quoted from the King James Bible.)

8 When I say 'glider,' I mean 'sugar glider,' a small arboreal marsupial indigenous to Australia and New Guinea.

9 "Zeru" means 'sky' in Basque. He is a kestrel (specifically a Nankeen, or Australian kestrel). Kestrels are associated with creativity, intuition and independence.

10 'Vendula' is a Czech name meaning "greater glory." She takes a rat form. Rats symbolize survival, resourcefulness, and hoarding behavior/greed.

11 The entire foxglove plant is poisonous, but the leaves mentioned are particularly potent and very likely to cause a fatal cardiac dysrhythmia (tachycardia or bradycardia, depending on the condition of the heart and the dose of the drug).

12 'Aeolus' (pronounced 'EE-o-lus') means 'quick-moving, nimble.' It was the name of the Greek god of the winds. Ravens symbolize transformation, magic, intelligence, perceptiveness, and cycles of death and rebirth.

13 The colors of Andromeda's aura indicate intelligence, sensitivity, compassion, will, passion, spirituality, honesty and devotion. The missing silver would signify the divine feminine energies (illumination, creativity and intuition).

14 **Andromeda's Lullaby**

Moon-glow lights the sky,/ Night songs play soft and low./ Mother's lullaby,/ And cricket's bow…/ Tow of summer wind,/ And call of guiding star:/ Listen and begin/ To find out who you are./ _(Chorus:) Sleep, my darling, my joy:_/_ Know that vigil I'll ever keep._ /_ Sleep now, my precious boy,_/ _Oh, my bright one: hush and sleep._ / Love's unfailing light/ Will guard you on your way: / Adamantine, bright / As the sun's ray…/ Grow up safe and strong/ And wise, and find your place; /Every note, your song/ Is blessed and full of grace…/ (Repeat chorus to 'hush,' then full chorus.)

15 Neo-pagan: A monthly rite honoring the Goddess, taking place at each full moon. (Compare with sabbat: any of eight solar festivals honoring the God.)

16 Neo-pagan: Drawing Down the Moon is a ritual traditionally performed during an esbat, wherein a practitioner (usually but not always the High Priestess of a coven) enters a trance-state and invokes the Goddess, in effect becoming the Goddess incarnate.

17 Latin: "I recant."

18 Latin: "Hail, Holy Queen," a traditional Marian anthem.

19 Polymerase chain reaction: PCR is a common and often indispensable technique used in medical and biological research labs for a variety of applications. These include DNA cloning for sequencing, DNA-based phylogeny, or functional analysis of genes; the diagnosis of hereditary diseases; the identification of genetic fingerprints (used in forensic sciences and paternity testing); and the detection and diagnosis of infectious diseases. (Quoted from Wikipedia.)

20 Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a technology that maps the blood flow in the brain and/or spinal cord in response to neural activity (i.e., hemodynamic response) and is essential in neuroanatomical study. (Quoted from Wikipedia.)

21 The lines Andromeda and Chase quote are from Doreen Valiente's "The Charge of the Goddess," a well-known work within the Pagan community (much-adapted and existing in many different versions).

22 The precise meaning of the name 'Rhea' is unknown; it may be related to elements meaning 'flow' or 'stream.' The mythical Rhea was a Titaness and mother of many of the Olympian gods and goddesses. 'Zephyr' is the name of the Greek god of the west wind; his settled form, a falcon, represents good timing, precision, grace, patience and mental acuity.

23 'Saining' is a general term for the Pagan form of Christening. It is also—depending on the tradition practiced by the newborn's family—referred to as Paganing or Wiccaning.

24 A reference to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which, by the way, states that the answer is '42').


End file.
